The Slayers of Dune Book II: Trinity
by MrPointy2
Summary: Slayers, Fish Speakers and Bene Gesserit must learn to work together or die.
1. Chapter 1

All characters from the Dune Universe are property of the Frank Herbert Estate. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

When strangers meet, great allowances should be made for differences of custom and training. The question then becomes, what latitude then do you give to people whose main focus in life is to battle the dead?

Bene Gesserit variant of Lady Jessica quotation.

Buffy dreamed that she was running in the sand. In her dream, she wore a white armored suit that covered her whole body. In her dream, she ran for kilometers and was not tired. She watched in a haze as kilometer after kilometer of tan desert sand undulated before her as she crossed the hot arid distance of the planet known as Dune. Her blonde hair was tied back into a bun. To the naked eye, she moved like a blur.

Buffy stopped suddenly in front of a cave sending up a plume of sand where her feet had jabbed into the ground. The cave jutted out of a mountain of rock that looked strangely out of place. Then she remembered. This was Mount Surayya. This was an asteroid that the slayer Surayya had dropped on a Hellmouth that had opened suddenly in the northern polar cap of Arrakis. Buffy stopped and stared into the dark mouth of the cave. She felt evil stirring there. She felt an ancient and powerful evil awaking that to her felt oddly familiar.

A voice, deep, sensual and male spoke to her.

"You are magnificent…" The voice said.

Buffy stood perfectly still in both horror and awe. Something in the back of her mind recognized that voice. She was at the same time enthralled and repulsed.

"All these years, fighting us, your power so near to our own."

"I know you." Buffy said to the darkness.

"You have never had a taste."

Buffy heard someone scream. She awoke.

Lisa and Surayya looked at her strangely. They were still in the lobby of the main Fish speaker embassy on Arrakis. A major meeting had been called between the slayers, the fish speakers and the Bene Gesserit, after the death of the Destroyer and the impact of a rather large asteroid on the Arrakis north polar region. It seems there were some strange events on the planet Gammu. Gammu was the place where the Senior Partner had launched his attack on Arrakis. Gammu was where the Senior Partner had resurrected Drusilla. There would be teleconferenced representatives from the techno planet of IX at the meeting as well. It seems that IX was the launching point of the missiles that had killed the Destroyer.

Even now, weeks later, the slayers stilled grieved for the Destroyer in their own way. The women would never show their tears but inside they osculated between fury and sorrow. The Destroyer was the source of the Slayer Sprit and as such they felt connected to him beneath the skin. When the Destroyer died, every slayer in the universe felt as if an arm had been cut off suddenly. Now, locked within their flesh was the last remnant of the spirit of the Destroyer.

Surayya slowly turned her eyes away from Buffy and resumed reading the text message that had just come across her communicator. She balanced the anxiety caused by the message with knowledge that Motorria was nearing term. Her baby would be born soon. The message Surayya read was simple, direct, to the point and very powerful.

It read: "We are returning." It was signed Fleet Commander Guerrero. ADM "Memories of Dawn"

The slayer fleet was returning.

Surayya felt both comforted and terrified. Soon there would be thousands of slayers on Arrakis and none of them in a mood to tolerate stupidity from the fish speakers or anyone else.

A stocky woman, wearing the stripes of a fish speaker commander, opened the huge polished wooden doors imported from the water rich planet of Caladan and motioned them to enter. Surayya, Lisa, and Buffy stood and made their way to the grand meeting room.

Buffy chided herself never to scream in her dreams again. As she was thinking this, Surayya turned and said something rather cryptic to her.

"All our dreams are prophecy dreams." Surayya said flatly.

The ship hovered above the mystic mountains of Earth. Drusilla was looking for something ancient and buried for tens of thousands of years. She let her visions guide her. She had been trained in the ways of the Bene Gesserit on Gammu by wise and terrible women. She learned everything she could from them before she slaughtered them all.

She had even killed the Senior Partner that had brought her back from the true death.

Under the influence of the black spice, created by the Senior Partner, she scanned all of the possible futures for clues to the location of the sacred object. The voice within her helped assimilate and process the flood of raw data.

Drusilla listened attentively to Alia, the sister of Paul Muad'dib. The magics of the Black Spice had given her demon self access to the female memories of people who had lived and died long after her transformation into nosferatu.

The Earth below her had done well in the absence of Man. Thick jungle covered every land mass on the planet. Even it's frozen poles were starting to show signs of life. Below Drusilla turned a huge banquet of life. There were places on Earth where herds of animals numbering in the tens of thousands roamed free.

Drusilla was looking for a special form of evil buried and forgotten within the Earth. She was looking for something old that the world had left behind when it went out to the stars.

Alia had the answer for her.

"There." The voice within her said. "The land was once called Transylvania. His castle is dust now. But what lies beneath lies undisturbed. "

Drusilla heeded the voice within. She angled her ship slightly, then drove down at hypersonic speeds towards the remains of castle Dracula.


	2. Chapter 2

All characters from the Dune Universe are property of the Frank Herbert Estate. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: "I feed on your energy."

Addenda to Orders in Council The Emperor Paul Muad'dib

The meeting was loud and raucous. Fish Speakers screamed at slayers. Slayers screamed at Fish Speakers. Accusations of treason and betrayal flew between the two parties like arrows. In the background, the Bene Gesserit silently observed. The Fish Speakers accused the slayers of stepping on their toes. The Slayers accused the Fish Speakers of being out of touch morons.

"Do you deny that the slayer fleet refused the lawful orders of Commander Gorman and refused to turn over the Atreides house atomics three years ago?" Supreme commander Adele asked. Surayya could hear the acid in her voice.

"Gorman?" Surayya said astonished at such a name being mentioned. "The only thing I remember about _Commander_ Gorman was that I killed her by driving the point of my scythe through her heart aboard "Her Graceful measure, and if you remember, Gorman was ready to burn Arrakis to the ground with a terawatt beam of antiprotons."

"You what?" Commander Adele retorted. This was the first she had heard of this. "You admit to murdering a Fish Speaker officer?"

"She was a vampire!" Surayya screamed. "She would have killed us all for fun. Vampires are soulless killing machines. They are not our friends!"

Buffy, who was sitting next to Surayya, declined to comment on that statement. She was thinking of her time with Angel and Spike. In their way, they had redeemed the reputation of vampires. As she thought of them, Buffy could feel a pressure stirring in the back of her mind. Something placed in her by the Destroyer dreamed of killing every demon in the universe no matter how she felt about them.

That didn't scare her.

"Slayers are cut from an unnatural fabric." The senior aide to Commander Adele said. "They pollute the world with the supernatural." She said.

Surayya was quick to respond.

"You used atomic weapons against the Destroyer on Arrakis soil!" She said venomously. "It's only because of the presence of the supernatural that Arrakis is not a radioactive wasteland."

The Bene Gesserit perked up at that news. They were shocked at the Fish Speaker extremes.

"The Slayers must conform to Fish Speaker authority!" Commander Adele said as she slammed her fist on the table revealing the true motives for the meeting.

"Listen to me." Surayya said with steel in her voice. The Bene Gesserit instantly picked up on the emotions in her voice. Surayya was dangerously close to her berserker rage. The Bene Gesserit understood that death was in the air.

"Leto awaked the slayers because the Old Ones were returning. The Destroyer spoke to Leto in his dreams and told him where to look. Only because of us does the golden path persist. We were given a separate and independent commission by Leto. We are the Slayers; we are the only and absolute authority in this galaxy in matters of the supernatural. We have a mission to…"

"Leto is dead. " Adele said interrupting Surayya. "We manage the galaxy now."

The slayers shifted in their chairs to a defensive position. The Bene Gesserit recognized it as a prelude to attack. Supreme Reverend Mother Paloma spoke to distract them and diffuse the tension in the room.

"Paul Muad'dib often said…"

Surayya barked at her "You are not the Gom Jabbar!" Surayya mimicked Paul perfectly in her voice and body language.

"Abomination!" The Bene Gesserit muttered under her breath.

"We are the steel hammer. We are the fist of the outer world. We are the slayers; we keep the law of the dead." The memory of Paul spoke through Surayya. Her use of the Voice was excellent. Surayya turned and spoke to the fish speaker commander.

"I was here, trapped on Arrakis, when the fish speakers went mad! For three years you engaged in a planetary war against your own people, against terrorist you never caught! How many people did you kill _after_ the destruction of the "Leit-Kynes"? How many people just disappeared into the night never to be seen again?"

The fish speakers looked at Surayya with contempt on their faces.

"How many of our daughters did you get killed on Tailos Three?" The Supreme Commander asked. The truth had finally been revealed. This was the real reason for the animosity the fish speakers held against the slayers.

Surayya looked dismayed and disgusted. She had led the assault on Tailos Three. She remembered how bravely her sisters had fought there. She remembered how brutally some had died there. Surayya was proud of every single slayer that had fought and died at Tailos Three.

A single tear formed in the corner of her eye as a wave of deep grief swept over her.

"Sometimes, we must give moisture to the dead." She heard the memory of Paul Muad'dib say within her. "They thirst as well."

"Your daughters knew their place and their purpose in the world. They did their job with faith and honor. " Surayya turned and spoke to the Supreme fish speaker commander directly. "I suggest you do the same."

The Bene Gesserit used ancient hand signs under the table to communicate with each other. The Bene Gesserit said with their hands:

"This won't be over until they kill each other."

Thick fog ruled the castle keep.

Drusilla crept along the decayed garden path that curved the edges of the ruins of castle Dracula. After thousands of years there was nothing left but indentures in the ground where heavy granite blocks had stood. The garden court yard was now a minor jungle. Drusilla could feel the presence of her target vibrating from beneath the ground. She knew she was near the sacred crypt.

"Wake up old father." Drusilla sang to herself as she made her way through the darkness. She approached a small clearing where nothing grew. All the plant life there was dead.

"Aw, look. "Drusilla said. "There's a hole in the world." She was preparing to bring out her digging equipment when she felt the presence of another.

"Why have you come for me daughter?" She heard a deep male voice say in the darkness. Drusilla could see nothing moving but she could feel something powerful hovering over her.

"You're not my daddy." She said. "You've a ghost." She could hear the presence shifting in the fog.

"My magics will not allow me to be caught unaware, even while I sleep. " The voice said. "I am a pile of bones and even now I could tear you apart.

Drusilla felt the cold fear coursing through her.

"Tell me daughter, why I shouldn't eat your dead heart and use your skin for a napkin?"

"Buffy." Drusilla said. "Buffy Summers is still alive. I know where she is now."

Drusilla could feel a shift in the spectral forces around her. Ancient machinery came to life as gears thousands of years old creaked to life. Forty seven booby traps disarmed themselves as the sleeper awakened. Even as a pile of bones, Dracula liked to run a tight ship. Before her a flight of stairs leading into the earth appeared.

"Enter, daughter. Once down, you will find a set of ingredients locked in a golden box. I will give you the combination o the vault and walk you through the ritual of resurrection."

Drusilla entered the cavern. She heard the voice speaking to her again.

"Tell me about Buffy." The spirit of Dracula said. "Is she well?"


	3. Chapter 3

All characters from the Dune Universe are property of the Frank Herbert Estate. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

**A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.**

The First Law of Mentat, quoted by Paul Atreides to Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam

"Tell me about the Senior Partners." Reverend Mother Paloma asked. She was finally able to get a word in edgewise. The slayers and the Fish Speakers had been going at it for over sixteen hours and were no closer to a consensus.

Surayya looked at Buffy who raised an eyebrow as she stared back at the dark skinned slayer.

"You know as much as I do." Buffy said.

"The Senior Partners are old; they are older than the Old Ones. The Senior Partners were one of the first species to evolve in the galaxy billions of years ago. They corrupted the Old Ones and turned them against the Destroyer. The Senior Partners manufactured the mystical weapons used to attack the Destroyer." Surayya said to the Paloma.

"…and the scythe carried by the slayers." She thought. Surayya kept that fact to herself.

"The Senior Partners aren't evil as such; they're just anal, extremely anal. They are the ultimate control freaks. They wouldn't destroy the world until they penciled it in on their calendar. They hate chaos. That's why they seeded the primordial seas of millions of worlds in the galaxy, including Earth. That's why they're in the hearts and minds of every Human in the Empire."

"_Where_ are the Senior Partners?" Paloma asked sharply. Surayya could tell that her question was part of a larger thought process.

Surayya searched her memories. She looked at Buffy and Lisa who had the same information she did. They had all been briefed by Motorria.

"The Senior Partners are not currently from this universe, that is to say they currently occupy a different set of dimensions. That's why they use a Kleynach demon to move between worlds. The Kleynach does not have to be summoned to move between dimensions."

At the mention of demons Paloma's face twisted into a grimace. "Such barbaric terminology." She thought. "Slayers are such a primitive and superstitious lot." She was a Bene Gesserit. She was better than that.

"That doesn't answer my question, girl. _Where_ are the Senior Partners?" Paloma asked again.

Surayya hesitated. If the Senior Partners had access to the infinite dimensionality of space-time why are they still bothering with Humans? And if they were in this universe, why would they need the ability to move between dimensions?" Surayya thought long and hard before she had her answer.

"A black hole." She said. "The Senior Partners are stuck inside the event horizon of a massive black hole.

"That's the same conclusion the sisterhood came to. " Paloma said as she looked over the papers she had before her. Paloma ran her fingers over the buttons at her station. A crystal clear image of the galactic center appeared on a large flat screen monitor. On the screen was a swirl of stars that crowded to a white blur at the center. A huge stream of interstellar gas lay across the burning white crown of stars.

"There." Paloma said pointing towards the screen. "The black hole at the center of our galaxy. It is monstrous. It has eaten several million solar masses. It is so huge; it covers a volume so large that you can put thousands of planets in the space between the event horizon and the singularity.

"I believe that's where the Senior Partners are located." Paloma clicked another button and the image disappeared. "These _aliens_, you call the senior partners, represent a clear and present danger to the human race, to the golden path. What we're going to do about them is still a matter to be addressed."

"I for one am not going into a black hole." Buffy said. "I was resurrected to fight evil on this side of the darkness." She said. Surayya agreed.

That got Surayya thinking. A god cannot die. The slayers held the spirit of the destroyer locked inside their bodies. But what about his soul? The soul of the Destroyer had to be somewhere safe and unharmed. How else could he be able to send dreams to slayers for thousands of years while he lay in his white tomb in Tailos three? If they could find a vessel, they could reintegrate sprit, body and soul, the core essence of being, the trinity, here on Arrakis. Surayya remembered what happened to Buffy just before they entered the conference room.

Buffy had a prophecy dream.

Buffy looked over at Surayya who was smiling.

"Why the grins?" She asked.

"I just realized." Surayya said. "The Destroyer is still alive, somewhere, out there, beyond the stars. We just have to find a way for him to move between dimensions and manifest himself here like the Senior Partners."

Later, that afternoon the Supreme Reverend Mother had a question.

"So tell me girl, what is the law of the dead?" Paloma asked sarcastically.

"The law of the dead is simple." Surayya answered her directly. "The dead stay dead." The women took a dinner break. They would start again after the evening meal.

Drusilla was all in wonder.

The resurrection spell given to her by the spirit of Dracula had worked it's magic. Blue white flames danced on the pile of bones that came together under the guidance of eldritch hands. Organs, skin and hair grew at an accelerated rate. She spent hours making sure his flesh was covered in warm blood. From a pile a bones, the great vampire had been born again.

She stood before Dracula, who towered over her. The dark master was well over seven feet tall, rail thin and skin as white as ivory. She watched him dress his naked body. Her eyes never moved from his taunt male form.

Dracula wore dark blue pants, a white silk shirt with cuffs and a black cape with a red velvet inner lining. On anyone else it would have looked ridiculous. On him, it looked regal and stunning.

"You are beautiful tatăl vechi" Drusilla said to him. "tatăl vechi" meaning 'old father'.

Dracula bared his fangs at her as he finished buttoning his shirt.

"I think he will do nicely." The memory of Alia said to Drusilla.

"Be careful." Drusilla replied. "We don't want to give away our plan."

"The old father has many powers. Telepathy is not one of them." Alia replied sharply.

"Yes, I think he will make a fine distraction for the slayers. While they chase after him, I will snatch the child. The Atreides bloodline will be mine to control." Drusilla thought. The two women conferenced together and took solace in their plan. They felt confident, safe and powerful.

Dracula looked over at her expressionless and dead eyed. He thought to himself.

"As soon as it is profitable, I'm going to kill this stupid woman."


	4. Chapter 4

All characters from the Dune Universe are property of the Frank Herbert Estate. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

**You will learn the integrated communication methods as you complete the next step in your mental education.** This is a gestalten function which will overlay data paths in your awareness, resolving complexities and masses of input from the mentat index-catalogue techniques which you have already mastered. **Your initial problem will be the breaking tensions arising from the divergent assembly of minutiae/data on specialized subjects. Be warned. Without mentat overlay integration, you can be immersed in the Babel Problem, which is the label we give to the omnipresent dangers of achieving wrong combinations from accurate information.**

The Mentat Handbook

"Tell me slayer, what are you to that monster you brought to Arrakis?" Supreme commander Adele asked. The evening meal was over. Everyone had returned to the grand meeting room to finish their discussions which at times sounded more like a den of lions than a meeting of the minds.

"That _monster _as you called him is the source of all the slayers. He is the reason we can fight the darkness. The Destroyer is the saving grace of this universe." Surayya said.

Reverend Mother Paloma chimed in. She read from the papers before her, papers clearly marked "classified."

"According to what I have here, the slayers were created by using the essence of a demon named Spike." She said. Paloma looked at Surayya with accusatory eyes. "What does that have to do with this _Destroyer_?" She asked.

"All demons come from the Destroyer." Surayya answered flatly. "Demons were not always degenerate. Billions of years ago, the Destroyer sent sparks of himself out into the darkness to explore the universe. In that darkness they were changed. The Old Ones were seduced and twisted by the Senior Partners. The rest of them just forgot who they were and why they were born. They became _lost. T_he dreams of the lost often become filled with fear and a nillism that is the anti thesis of Life. The essence of Spike is the essence of the Destroyer, the essence of any vampire is the essence of the Destroyer."

"But you can teleport." Paloma said with a rising inflection.

"Spike was a _magic_ vampire. He was special. In the days of his second death he wore an amulet given to him by the Senior Partners that created a _shorting of the way _between his essence and the sun. Spike became the physics of the _Kwisatz Haderach_ tens of thousands of years before you Bene Gesserit thought of it."

"How _exactly_ did the Bene Gesserit get the idea of the Kwisatz Haderach?" Surayya thought to herself.

"Because the essence Spike was enchanted, because the Senior Partners never came back and unenhanced him, like the monks that created Dawn never came back and uncreated her." Surayya looked over at Buffy.

Surayya said with her eyes. "Sorry about showing up at the Magic Shop and waving a knife around." Buffy's response was a lopsided grin. Her way of saying: "Sorry I had to kick your ass."

Paloma watched the exchange between the two. She could tell that something had passed between the two women. She had no idea what.

Paloma realized then that the slayers were close, not just comrade close, not just sister close, not just synchronized close. Paloma realized that the slayers were united by a common sprit and a bond that reached beyond the flesh. Surayya had said that the Destroyer was the source of them.

Paloma came to the obvious conclusion.

"When do you plan on bringing the Destroyer back?" She asked. All other conversations in the room stopped dead.

"Soon. Motorria is drawing up a list of people we have to kill."

Paloma's jaw dropped.

Surayya smiled. She loved yanking the Bene Gesserit chains.

Later that night, Buffy and Surayya conferenced together in one of the unused hallways in the Fish Speaker command center. They were reviewing their plan to resurrect the Destroyer. They couldn't verify if their quarters were bugged.

"For a second there, I thought that old lady was going to drop a load in her robe." Buffy said.

""That _old lady, _is the supreme reverend mother of the Guild of the Bene Gesserit. " Surayya grinned. "Yeah, I thought she was going to lose it too." Surayya's tone turned serious.

"How do we raise a God?" Surayya asked.

"Shake'm real hard till he wakes up?" Buffy said in a smart ass tone.

"The Destroyer was wiped from the face of Arrakis. Most of him is in a bucket at sietch Kindle. " Surayya said.

There was a long silence between them.

"The Master!" Buffy said suddenly, "The Master had a spell that linked vampires together. As the vessel fed, the Master became stronger. Couldn't we use something like that to link to the Destroyer?"

"There's nothing to link to. The Destroyer is just _gone_ from this world. There's nothing to link to. We need to punch a hole to wherever he is and allow his essence to flow back into this universe."

"What about Eryishon?" Buffy asked. "Can't we just call the Destroyer from the wishverse?"

Surayya looked at her like she was crazy. "I do not, repeat, I do not, ever want to encounter a wish demon."

Buffy remembered Anya warmly. Despite all of the blood she had spilled over the centuries, she had come to love humanity after she became human. She died at the battle of Sunnydale.

"Too bad we can't just ask a Senior Partner to scan the multiverse for any sign of the Destroyer." Buffy said. Surayya took a moment to decide if Buffy was serious. Then it hit her.

"We don't have a Senior partner, but we have the scythe!" She said excited. "We know it's an enchanted weapon. We can use it like a compass to point us to where the essence of the Destroyer is resting." That idea seemed to energize Surayya.

Thinking about the meeting Buffy asked. "Do you think we're ever make peace with the Fish Speakers and the Bene Gesserit?"

"Are you kidding?" Surayya said. "We're going to be fighting these women until the end of days."

"You never know." Buffy said. "I once had to make a deal with Spike to keep Angel from sucking the world into a hell dimension. Sometimes, your enemies can be your best friend. "

"I remember." Surayya said. "Like I was there."

"And that is so creepy at so many levels." Buffy said as she smiled at Surayya.

"What's even creeper is that I have no memories of you making a deal with Illyria to be reborn. In fact, I have no memories of you past the age of thirty."

"Yeah, that's a little something Willow and I cooked up. I didn't want you to see me coming."

"What else have you done?" Surayya asked suddenly serious.

Buffy looked back at Surayya. There was something in her eyes and the way she held herself that made it feel as if she was holding vast and dark secrets.

"I have done and will do everything the Destroyer has asked of me." She said. With that, Buffy turned and walked casually back to her quarters.

"Wheels within Wheels…" Surayya thought.


	5. Chapter 5

All characters from the Dune Universe are property of the Frank Herbert Estate. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed. We feel threatened by such demands. "I already know the important things!" we say. Then Changer comes and throws our old ideas away.

-The Zensufi Master

The sun was setting on Arrakis.

Orange white light fell through the narrow rectangular fifty foot window slats than lined the outer court of the fish speaker command center. Supreme Reverend Mother Paloma watched the sun set as she meditated over what she had learned from the slayers. She ran her fingernails under each other to clean the dirt from under them as she tried to marshal her thoughts. The slayers were truly terrifying. They spoke of demons, gods and monsters as if they were real. The Slayers operated in a fantastic world where the impossible was every day.

"_The slayers keep the law of dead which is this: The dead stay dead."_ The slayer Surayya has spoken to her. Paloma could tell that Surayya carried with her at all times a barely restrained threat of violence. She moved with it as casually as she moved her hips when she walked. Paloma watched the slayers in the Bene Gesserit way. They all moved like predators. She watched Surayya, Buffy and Lisa. They moved together like a pack of wolves, like a school of fish. The women were never anymore than four feet apart from each other, each one of them scanning overlapping regions of the space around them. Paloma was sure the slayers were not even aware that they were doing it.

"Leto made them. What could have provoked the creation of such women?" Paloma thought. "If there are monsters in the world, do we use fire to fight fire? What is the profit to becoming the darkness?" She thought of Surayya speaking in Muad'dib voice. "We may end up burning the world." Paloma thought of the mountain that occupied the northern polar region of Arrakis, a mountain pulled down from the stars by the will of one woman.

"One woman pulled a mountain down from the sky. "Paloma repeated the litany against fear. The slayers were truly terrifying.

Paloma viewed the microscopic dots on the hair thin piece of wire she held before her. Reverend Mother Bastra was still sending timely reports from sietch Kindle about the slayer child and his mother. Her worst fears were confirmed. The child would be a damn Kwisatz Haderach. It would have the ability to access higher spatial dimensions. The last time a Kwisatz Haderach appeared, the galaxy was thrown into chaos for three thousand years. Paloma didn't relish what would come once that child was born.

The sun has set. It was dark outside. Beyond the fish speaker courtyard, the golden yellow lights of the city began to show.

The dark man stood before her. He appeared out of nowhere. Paloma assumed he had walked across the eight hundred meter courtyard which now appeared curiously empty. The dark man stood before her, his cape moving slowing in the evening breeze. He tipped his hat, which along with his costume seemed like something out of eighteenth century England. Paloma looked up at his eyes which were dark and hypnotic. She noticed his skin was pale as white smoke. She could see the tendons of his muscles moving beneath his skin. The man looked gaunt. He looked as if he had just come back from the dead.

"Do you know where I might find a Buffy Summers?" He asked. His accent was thick. He sounded like nothing in the known worlds.

"Yes, master." Paloma found herself saying. Despite all of her Bene Gesserit training she felt an overwhelming compulsion to obey him. "She is with the other slayers in the main conference room."

"_Other_ slayers?" Dracula said. "In my time, there was only one." "What have I been sent into?" Dracula thought to himself. He thought for a moment, then he had a plan.

"Bring everyone to me that is not a slayer. Have them meet me here in the courtyard." He said.

"Yes, master." Paloma replied. As she rose to obey, Dracula stopped her.

"But first, I must have a taste." He said. Dracula grabbed the old woman and savagely tore into her throat. His fangs dripped with blood.

Motorria spent the evening with her son. She was near term now. The pregnancy was almost over. The baby would be born soon. Motorria was a slayer and trained in the ways of the Bene Gesserit. She had an intimate and detailed knowledge of her body, even the parts of her body that would soon detach and start a separate life of its own.

She swam in a sea of memories that was her son's life. Like no other Bene Gesserit before her, she explored the mysteries of the "Y" chromosome, she reviewed the pre-life memories locked away at the genetic level that her son carried. This was the lineage of Paul Muad'dib and the thousands of men that came before him.

"Who's that?" Motorria heard her unborn son ask from within her.

The memories of a man torn from life and transformed into an agent of darkness lay before them. They watched and understood the decades of horror and blood that ancestor had caused. They understood his connection to Buffy Summers and knew they had the right one.

"All things considered, this is pretty invasive." Her unborn son said.

"A fetus has no expectations of privacy." Motorria responded.

"So, is he the one I'm supposed to be?" The unborn asked.

"I would like it to be so." Motorria told him.

"Ok, but don't blame me if his memories become too strong and I go crazy and stuff." Her son said.

"Where did you pick up such 20th century verbiage?" Motorria asked.

"Just trying to get into character." He said.

Motorria felt monstrous energies shift within her. Her body had come to its conclusion. Her water broke.

"Alright, Liam." She said to her unborn son. Let's get this Shanshu prophecy on the road."


	6. Chapter 6

All characters from the Dune Universe are property of the Frank Herbert Estate. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

The trouble with some kinds of warfare (and be certain the Tyrant knew this, because it is implicit in his lesson) is that they destroy all moral decency in susceptible types. Warfare of these kinds will dump the destroyed survivors back into an innocent population that is incapable of even imagining what such returned soldiers might do.

-Teachings of the Golden Path,  
Bene Gesserit Archives

The slayers sat huddled together at one end of the long conference table. Night had fallen. They were waiting for the evening session to begin. So far, no one other than them had arrived. They found it very strange.

"Where is everyone?" Lisa asked. It was one of the rare times she spoke. She looked around the huge conference room with its fifty foot windows and gold and white heavy cotton curtains. The room looked terribly empty.

"Maybe they're in the _other_ freakishly large conference room." Buffy said. She was getting bored.

"My mother was a fish speaker." Surayya said to no one in particular and for no obvious reason. "I haven't seen my family since the academy." She said.

Lisa squeezed her hand. She understood what Surayya was saying.

"Have you tried to find them?" Buffy asked.

"I tried during the Fish speaker occupation. They were gone. My entire village was burned to the ground. Everyone I had grown up with was missing. The only person I still know from the old days is Motorria. We grew up together." Surayya stopped for a moment. Her silence hung heavy in the air.

Lisa looked at her strangely. She had never known Surayya to be so sentimental. Lisa observed Surayya in the minute way she had been trained. She noticed fine crow's feet around Surayya's eyes.

That's when she punched her in the shoulder.

"You're turning into an old lady!" She said.

Surayya turned and looked at her and said "You're wrong. I'm no lady."

They smiled at each other.

Across the huge conference room, massive doors swung back on their hinges. A mob of fifty fish speakers and Bene Gesserit entered. Buffy noticed the splattering of blood across the front of Reverend Mother Paloma's black aba robe and the twin puncture marks on her neck. The mob spread itself out along both sides of the conference table as they rushed towards the slayers.

"What the…!" Lisa said. She reached for her scythe.

"I knew we pissed them off." Buffy said.

Surayya didn't care. The first wave of fish speakers slammed into the slayers at full speed knocking Lisa against the wall. Surayya stepped into them fists swinging. Three of the fish speakers were down. Surayya pinned a Bene Gesserit against the wall with her forearm, twisted backwards and slammed the bottom of her foot into an attackers face.

Lisa was pissed. She screamed a blood curling yell and jumped onto the conference table. She fixed her eyes on the fish speakers still rushing into the room. She ran at full speed and launched herself into the women. She smashed her elbow down on the fish speakers head, then jabbed the next woman's choroid artery with a two finger cobra strike cutting off all blood flow to her brain. Someone hit Lisa in the back of her head with something hard. Razor sharp finger nails sliced across her face drawing blood.

Something clicked in Lisa's mind. She went into berserker mode.

She grabbed the first person in reach and slammed the woman's head into the edge of the conference table. The fish speaker skull split open. Bone fragment and brains went everywhere. Adrenaline mixed with her slayer strength. Lisa hit the next fish speaker hard enough to break two of her ribs which didn't matter. A fraction of a second later, Lisa drove the palm of her hand into the fish speakers jaw hard enough to snap her neck. Two Bene Gesserit jumped her and tried to hold her down.

Lisa growled as she inhaled deeply supercharging her blood stream with oxygen. The last thing she remembered was the room flashing white and everything else disappearing from her mind.

The white faded. The adrenaline faded. Lisa slowly faded in from wherever her mind had gone.. The floor was littered with bodies. There was blood on the walls. Brain matter covered the conference table. Buffy and Surayya stood very still in the far corner of the conference room.

Buffy looked at the slivers of entrails and torn flesh dangling from Lisa's fingernails and said: "It's always the quite ones that will surprise you.

Lisa was still breathing heavily when she turned her red rimmed eyes towards the two other slayers. It took her a moment to fully observe the room and take in all that she had done.

Lisa's face scrunched up in horror. Surayya rushed to her side grabbed her and held her head to her bosom to comfort her. Lisa was heaving in thick sobs. Surayya looked back towards Buffy.

"The three years we spent trapped on Arrakis under Fish Speaker occupation was a lot harder than we let on. Not all the soldier's have returned home from the war." Surayya held Lisa and was prepared to hold her as long as it took.

Buffy felt the presence of a supernatural force. The other slayer felt it to. Buffy handed them their scythe's. The three women stood facing the hallway from inside the conference room. The lights in the hallway flickered then went out. Darkness creeped along the walls towards them. All the lights went out. The emergency generator kicked in. The room was bathed in blood red light.

Buffy felt him first.

Dracula morphed out of the darkness. First his pale white skin appeared, and then his sharp white teeth Suddenly, the rest of him was there, hovering over the slayers.

"Magnificent!" He said in a tone of erotic decadence. "The Beast is alive and well within you. Your energies are so much like my own. " Dracula licked his lips.

A scythe flew out of the darkness followed by another. Dracula was pinned to the bloody wall, impaled by Lisa and Buffy's scythe.

"Alright asshole. Time to die." Surayya stepped forward with burning red hate in her eyes.


	7. Chapter 7

All characters from the Dune Universe are property of the Frank Herbert Estate. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

This is the fallacy of power: ultimately it is effective only in an absolute, a limited universe. But the basic lesson of our relativistic universe is that things change. Any power must always meet a greater power. Paul Muad'Dib taught this lesson to the Sardaukar on the Plains of Arrakeen. His descendants have yet to learn the lesson for themselves.

The Preacher at Arrakeen

"Did you think I would so easy to kill?" Dracula asked. His body was staked against the bloody walls of the fish speaker conference room. Three angry women stood before him. One of them glared at him with fire in her eyes.

"You are as the slayers of old." He said. "You carry the beast inside of you."

Dracula morphed. Slowly, from the edges, he changed into a standing cloud of black smoke. He rematerialized clear of the scythes that remained embedded in the wall behind him.

"Hello Buffy." Dracula said. His eyes fixed on the slayer he had known tens of thousands of years ago. "You are still magnificent." He said to her. "Your energy so much like my own."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah" Buffy said as sarcastically as possible. "Here's the 411 grandpa. We're all pieces of the Destroyer. So yeah, were cut from the same fabric with one big difference. You're a soulless monster, so that 18th century rap is not going to cut it. Buffy said full of bluster and false bravado. Inside she felt very different. She could feel her body warming. She could feel the fires of erotic attraction spreading out from her loins. In the space of one breath, she found herself lost in Dracula's deep dark eyes.

Surayya approached him. She walked slowly, not out of fear, but out of self control. She wanted to tell Dracula something before she killed him. Dracula watched the woman approach. His fingers curved like claws. Without thinking, he tilted his body to slash at her.

"I know you." Surayya said to him. "My memories of you are clear. I know what you are. I know the magics you use to enthrall your victims. I know the magics you use to shape shift. They are cheap and you are stupid."

Slowly and firmly Surayya clamped her hands across Dracula's wrist. Her skin felt warm and soft as it coupled with his cold dead flesh.

"We're not children anymore. We're not afraid of you. You can't scare us and chase us around your castle for fun. You can't murder us for food. You can't drink our blood to live." Surayya said as she leaned in to him. The things Dracula had done were sharp and clear in her mind.

"We will not be your thralls. We are not the shadow of the three sisters." She whispered to him. "In your absence we've changed. We are now more powerful than you can imagine." She whispered to him. Surayya turned and spoke to Lisa. "Get Buffy back to Sietch Kindle. " She said. "I got this."

Surayya thrust against him as her eyes rolled back and she harnessed her powers. In a flash of light, she and Dracula teleported away.

Buffy's communicator beeped. She looked at it for a moment. On the screen was a short, simple message. Buffy smiled.

"It's from Motorria. She's given birth. It's a boy."

The women hugged.

"May fortune shine upon the house of Summer." Lisa said to her. They were about to teleport out when they heard moaning from the bloodied and torn bodies that littered the room. Buffy located the source first. It was reverend mother Paloma. She was still alive. Buffy quickly found her. She pulled off of her a body whose head hung limp and loose at an unnatural angle. They checked the others. There were no other survivors.

"Might as well take her with us." Buffy said. Lisa agreed. They teleported out.

Hours later, fish speaker security found the room. Command went insane with grief.

"The damn slayers!" She thought to herself. "The damn slayers did this!" Supreme commander Adele read the list of the people killed. Fifty names scrolled by on her tablet computer. She knew quite a few of them personally. Adele could barely contain her rage. Her fingers were trembling in anger.

"No matter what I have to do, the slayers will pay in blood for this." The Supreme Commander thought to herself as she dropped to her desk and flooded it with tears.

They appeared on the dayside of Arrakis. Surayya let him go. Dracula stumbled backwards and fell on the hot desert sand. White smoke poured off of his body. The sun began the process of killing him. Surayya stepped back as Dracula made a lunge for her.

"We're not little girls anymore. And you, you stupid monster, you're way behind the times." Surayya sneered at him as she disappeared in a burst of light.

Dracula morphed into smoke and buried himself deep beneath the sands of Arrakis. Wisps of smoke occasionally leaked from the sands beneath as Dracula waited for the cover of darkness.


	8. Chapter 8

All characters from the Dune Universe are property of the Frank Herbert Estate. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

In order to understand the meaning of victory, you must first define your enemies... and your allies.

Xavier Harkonnen

Surayya walked into sietch Kindle. She had just dropped Dracula into the day time sands of the deep desert after he had send a wave of minions against her and the other slayers at fish speaker command. Surayya never teleported directly into sietch Kindle. It would be far too dangerous. She could easily teleport into solid rock or worst yet someone she loved.

Surayya walked into the sietch and looked around at the people in her life. To her left, was Lisa and Buffy. Both of them were blonde and medium height. Lisa had more of a round face with a few freckles while Buffy was a fraction of a inch taller with larger breasts and a sturdier frame. She had known Lisa since their days at the academy. Lisa was always somewhat quiet but when she spoke it was wise to listen to her. In their military classes, Lisa was an excellent tactician. During the occupation of Arrakis by the Fish speakers Lisa's Ad hoc plans had saved their lives on more than one occasion.

Surayya was not so sure about Buffy. She was very much an enigma. To Surayya, Buffy was part legend and part mystery. She recalled the Destroyer calling her "_a permanent apocalypse_." What the hell did that mean? Surayya stopped and watched Buffy intensely for a moment. She watched as Buffy's hands gestured excitedly to Lisa as she regaled tales of how she fought some monster thousands of years ago. Buffy's hands looked so small and pink. Then she remembered. Those were the same hands that had torn Illyria's head from her body. Surayya shivered despite the heat.

"I think Buffy may be the _real_ monster here." She thought. Between the two women lay baby Liam wrapped in a black and red blanket. It took Surayya a moment to notice that the blanket that held the baby was also marked with the green and white of the Atreides battle standard. Baby Liam was wrapped in the battle flag of House Atreides.

"That does not bode well." Surayya thought. The baby looked so small, brown and fragile. "If that kid starts calling me auntie Surayya…" A funny scenario played out in her mind.

"Hey Auntie Surayya, what's that?" The kid said as he pointed to her weapon.

"It's the scythe kid. Now leave me alone while I fight the forces of darkness."

Surayya chuckled to herself. She looked to her right and saw Motorria talking with Supreme reverend mother Paloma. The way Motorria's hands moved over Paloma's body it appeared that Motorria was healing her. Motorria had become awfully good at the magics. Motorria was someone else she had known from the academy. In fact they had grown up together in the same village. Both of their mothers were fish speakers from the same garrison. She and Motorria use to hunt scorpions in the sand when they were kids.

"When we were kids?" Surayya found that thought disturbing. "That was only six years ago. We've come so far so quickly." Surayya looked at Motorria again. She could see tiny golden sparks dripping from her fingers as she practiced the healing arts.

"I want my friend back." Surayya thought. She didn't realize until now just how much she missed hanging out with her best friend. Surayya walked over to Motorria and gently put her arms around her making sure not to disturb her work.

"Tough day at the office, dear?" Motorria asked her using the twentieth century idioms she had picked up from Liam.

Surayya laid the side of her head on Motorria's back. It felt very warm and smelled of dirt, sweat and spice.

"We were attacked by the thralls of Dracula. Lisa slaughtered fifty fish speakers and Bene Gesserit with her bare hands and on top of all that I think fish speaker command is still angry at us about Tailos Three. I don't think there will ever be any peace between us." Surayya said full of distraught.

Motorria thought about everything Surayya had just said and responded "Just another day in the garden of the spectacular."

Surayya agreed and said: "We better get ready for what comes next. No doubt there's going to be some fallout. Just one question Moto."

"Yes?" Motorria responded.

"Do you thing the fish speakers will use nuclear weapons?" Surayya asked

On the other side of the planet, the sun had finally set. Dracula, in his smoke form, erupted from beneath the sand. Blackness spewed skywards like smoke from a volcano.

"They would mock me!" Dracula thought in rage. "They would laugh at the Lord of the undead? I have slaughtered armies with my bare hands. I have killed children in the presence of their mothers, I have laid waste to entire nations and these damn children mock me?" The ribbon of smoke shot across the night sky like lightening. Dracula could feel the presence of the slayers even from the other side of the world. The sun was rising where the slayers were. That didn't stop him. Dracula was crazed with the blood lust. Beneath him, he could see a fleet of fish speaker assault ships headed towards sietch kindle. In a blink of an eye, Dracula did a right angle turn. The column of smoke slammed into the lead Fish Speaker ship. Screams could be heard coming from the inside. The clear plaz viewports of the lead ship was quickly covered in blood.

She knew something was wrong. Supreme Commander Arlene could not make contact with the lead ship of the slayer assault fleet. She had made up her mind hours before to wipe the slayers from the face of Arrakis. She would kill them all. From her command station where she monitored the progress of the fleet all she could hear was static coming over the loudspeakers. What came before the static was terrifying. What came before the static were screams.

"What have they done?" She asked herself as her support staff looked around the eerie machine lit room in silence. "What have those damn slayers done?"

"I count eight heavy class assault ships moving in on you." Amir said. He had been monitoring the air space above sietch kindle from orbit as per Surayya's instructions. Her intuition had paid off. The Fish Speakers were attacking at the first light of dawn.

"Rodger that." Surayya said from sietch kindle. You are green for intercept. Out" The transmission from sietch Kindle ended. Amir flipped a couple of switches on the communications console bringing the commander of the scoobie fleet online. He bought the fleet commander up to speed.

Fleet commander Arshia gave the order. Twelve fighter ships dropped from orbit. Their hulls glowed orange white as they slammed into the atmosphere of Arrakis at supersonic speed.

Supreme reverend Mother Paloma awakened slowly. Everything in the last twenty four hours had been like a dream. She remembered being attacked by a gaunt man at Fish Speaker Central. She remembered the pain of him biting into her throat. She remembered feeling her warm blood flowing down the front of her robe.

"What has happened to me?" She thought frantically to herself.

She remembered watching a small blond slayer kill everyone around her with her bare hands. She remembered lying in a pool of someone else's blood. Now she was here in sietch Kindle surrounded by slayers. She felt her neck where the man had bit her. Her skin was smooth. There was no wound on her neck.

She observed the sietch in the Bene Gesserit way. The slayers were rushing about gathering weapons and huddled together in tactical planning groups. Paloma took a deep breath. She could smell human body odor, spice and dust. She did not smell the pheromones given off by fear.

"So, the slayers are not afraid but they are preparing to fight." She thought. Paloma stood and braced herself for the battle to come. That's when she noticed the child and the tall strange woman that stood over it. The woman's face was oval and her figure was slim. Paloma could easily tell by her body language that she was trained as a Bene Gesserit, yet there was something odd about her. The woman standing near the child was not watching the child. She was watching the slayers move about.

"She's going to steal the baby the first chance she gets!" Paloma's well trained mind screamed at her. Before she was aware of it, reverend mother Paloma began moving towards Drusilla.

With the sun at their back, they swooped in low and fast. Dracula was not stupid. He had thousands of years of battle experience. He did not become the pile of bones that Drusilla found until late in the twenty-third century. He had a firm grasp of technology. Dracula ordered the assault fleet to swoop in low, only meters above the sand dunes, and ramp up to full speed. He was going to fall upon the slayers with no mercy.

Buffy be damned.

Dracula sat in the blood covered command chair. The remaining crew was in his thrall now. They did as he commanded.

"Do we have missiles?" Dracula asked.

"Yes, my lord." A technician said.

"Good." Dracula growled. "Fire them all."

Hundreds of missiles blossomed from the ships each carrying multi-kiloton warheads. Dracula leaned in close to the radar screen at his command chair anticipating the glorious death he had unleashed.

Fire poured out of the sky in the form of blue-green laser light. The missiles exploded in plumes of orange-white fire.

"We've got a clear sky." Amir said. He was monitoring the scoobie fighters from orbit. Something emerged from the cloud of plasma that filed his radar screen. One missile had escaped and was on terminal course to strike the slayers.

"No! No! No!" Amir screamed. "Command to fleet, you missed one! Intercept! Intercept!" Amir pounded his fist against the screen in frustration.

Dracula roared. _Something_ had stopped his attack and that angered him greatly. Dracula keyed the intra-fleet communication system. "By my command, fly your ships into sietch Kindle. Suicide yourselves for my glory."

Dracula thought of a phrase first used by the Japanese long, long ago.

"Tora! Tora! Tora!" Seven ships peeled away and accelerated to ramming speed. All of his men would die. Dracula didn't care.

A single fighter chased the missile across the desert. The pilot inside was squished into his seat by the high gee's he pulled.. In the end it didn't matter. The missile impacted at the entrance to stench Kindle.

The explosion rocked the world. A ball of orange-white fire blossomed in the sand. Thick black smoke rolled upwards into the sky. The ground shook. In orbit, Amir put his palm to his mouth to stifle a scream.

Inside the sietch Surayya watched the pretty orange white flames lick against the shield Motorria had erected. She turned to her friend and said: "People always forget we have the galaxy's most powerful witch here." Motorria's eyes were pitch black.

Surayya watched the flames for a moment. Her attention was grabbed by the sound of a struggle coming from the back of the sietch. She turned in time to see reverend mother Paloma lunge at Drusilla.


	9. Chapter 9

All characters from the Dune Universe are property of the Frank Herbert Estate. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

It's easier to be terrified by an enemy you admire.

Thufir Hawat to Feyd-Rautha

The women fought like tigers.

Drusilla blocked a throat punch from Reverend Mother Paloma with her arm then pushed the woman backwards. Drusilla's black robes flapped as she brought her arms down in the crouching tiger position. Paloma recognized the fighting style. She suddenly knew the names of the women that had trained Drusilla. They were the missing reverend mothers from the Gammu chapter house, the same women that had gone missing months before.

Paloma knew then, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this was the monster that had killed them. This enraged her. She used her rage to focus her mind on the killing the monster before her. Drusilla's face shifted. Her brow became ridged. Her eyes became a fiendish yellow. Her mouth spouted fangs.

"She's like the man that attacked me!" Paloma thought. "Is this what they call a vampire?" Paloma suppressed her nagging uncertainty. She was in the midst of a life and death struggle and had no time let her mind wander.

Near the sietch mouth Surayya turned to the fight between Paloma and Drusilla. Her eyes caught sight of Motorria. Her lips were moving and not just in the way needed to maintain the shield. It almost looked as if Motorria was talking to someone.

Motorria basked in a fountain of power. The energies needed to maintain the shield around the sietch were tremendous. Motorria was channeling enough energy to fuel the entire slayer fleet for years on end. That mystical energy would not be contained. It leaked into the other parts of her. Motorria had given birth only hours before. The pre-life memories held by the child were still contained within her. Under the influence of the magics she channeled, those memories rose like a black wave washing over and covering her. The illumination of her mind no longer lit the world around her but instead was caught and channeled into a _no-space_ which was the darkness of years. Images, which were flecks and pieces of the child's pre-life memories, seemed to zoom past her.

The first suicide bomber slammed into the sietch. The shields faltered for a moment then strengthened. A handsome man in his mid thirties suddenly appeared before her.

"Hello, Liam." Motorria said.

The handsome man before her smiled. Motorria could see why Buffy had fallen in love with him.

"You are a construct." Motorria said to him. "Genetic memories have organized themselves in such a way that I can see the empty spaces between the experiences of memories. Over the thousands of years, your grandfather's genes have become a part of the Atreides bloodline. You are implied by the interactions of millions of other memories. You are the footprint in the snow."

Motorria could hear the sounds of struggle behind her. Surayya had joined the fray between Drusilla and Reverend Mother Paloma. Motorria continued to balance the energies that fueled the shield around the sietch while she kept those energies from drowning her in the echoes of the past.

The handsome man stepped forward.

"My name is Angel. He said. I know what you have to do."

Motorria looked at him puzzled.

"Vampires are soulless killing machines; however, they are influenced by the flesh they wear. Hence, they have personality. The soul of a vampire can be restored."

That revelation awakened other memories. What Angel was suggesting became abundantly clear. The spell was a simple matter for her. She didn't even need the orb of Thessela. She could summon a soul and hold it in her bare hands. She was that powerful.

"You want me to give Dracula his soul back? Motorria said impressed at the scale and simplicity of the plan.

The second suicide bomber slammed into the sietch scattering shrapnel for hundreds of meters. The shield held steady. Motorria remembered the spell by Willow Rosenberg. She began to repeat it. Mystical energies that paled in comparison to what she was currently channeling flowed through her.

"I'm going to field test the spell." She said to the memory of Angel. "I'm going to see if I can first give Drusilla back her soul. Motorria completed the spell. Something pale and white condensed from the universe beyond. It hesitated in the air for a moment then shot directly for Drusilla.

The Vampire screamed as something pale and hot pierced her. Drusilla held her head as she fell to the ground. The memories of all her sins came back to her. Guilt slammed down on her like the weight of an entire planet. Her howls became a soft sobbing moan. Small tears escaped her.

Buffy looked over at Surayya puzzled. She had joined the fight along with Reverend Mother Paloma and Surayya. The gashes on Buffy's face were healing quickly. Her white armor absorbed the blood spilled on it.

"What the..? Do vampires in the future routinely go crazy or what?" Buffy asked.

"You don't see it?" Surayya asked. "She has her soul back." Surayya looked over at Motorria who seemed to be holding a conversation with someone invisible.

"Moto restored Drusilla's soul." Surayya was in awe.

Buffy hesitated only a moment. She reached down and pulled the Gem of Amara off of Drusilla's finger. She then grabbed her scythe and with one smooth motion decapitated Drusilla as she lay on the ground. The vampire's body exploded in a cloud of dust.

Surayya looked up at Buffy shocked and angry.

"She had a soul!" Surayya screamed at Buffy. "She had her soul back!"

Buffy looked at Surayya firmly with a strange expression on her face. She seemed smug and distant. This was not at all the girl she remembered.

"I am a _permanent_ apocalypse for demon kind." Buffy said. "She had her soul back but she was still a vampire, she was still a monster. The Destroyer charged me with one commission. I have been charged to destroy all monsters. I am the law!"

And with that, Buffy turned and walked away.


	10. Chapter 10

All characters from the Dune Universe are property of the Frank Herbert Estate. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

**Faith**: There's only supposed to be one. Maybe that's why you and I can never get along. We're not supposed to exist together.

**Buffy**: Also, you went evil and were killing people.

**Faith**: Good point. Also a factor.

**Buffy**: But you're right. I mean, like... I guess everyone's alone, but... being a Slayer? There's a burden we can't share.

**Faith**: And no one else can feel it... Thank God we're hot chicks with superpowers.

**Buffy**: Takes the edge off.

**Faith**: _[nods]_ Comforting.

BTVS, "_End of Days_"

Dracula watched the last of his suicide bombers disappear in a fiery explosion. The last assault ship crashed into the invisible shield surrounding sietch Kindle and was instantly destroyed. Dracula gripped the arm rests on the captain's chair tearing into its faux leather covering. Dracula considered his options.

"How long will it take us to reach central command?" Dracula asked the pilot sitting to his left. Dracula didn't know the exact name of the army that ruled this planet, but he knew that every army had a central command.

The young pilot was completely under Dracula's thrall. He instantly obeyed every command of his master. Yes, deep down inside, the pilot was screaming to himself to be free.

"Three hours, my master. It will take three hours to return to Fish Speaker Command." He said.

"Make it so." Dracula said. He had made his choice. As soon as he was able, he would return to these obstinate slayers with the entire weight and arsenal of the Fish Speaker Command

Reverend Mother Paloma reviewed the facts as fantastic as they were. There were monsters in the universe, monsters that the human race had no defense against except for the slayers. This was a terrible volubility. Reverend Mother Paloma didn't like vulnerabilities. The Bene Gesserit were long term planners. They hated anything that upset their thousand year plans. The last major blind spot they had resulted in the Kwisatz Haderach being born one generation too early and three thousand year of rule under Leto the Tyrant.

"No. Never again." Reverend Mother Paloma said to herself. Her thoughts had come to upset her. She was in conference with Reverend Mother Basara.

"You have _served_ with these slayers?" Paloma asked her.

"Yes, Mother Superior." Basara answered. "They are honorable in their way. But know this; the slayers embody an incredible power almost beyond comprehension. I've watched a hand full of women take on and defeat the god's themselves aboard "Her Graceful Measure."

"Her Graceful Measure" Paloma muttered to herself. She had read the reports on what had happened inside of Leto's planet killer. Paloma was glad it had been decided to fly "Her Graceful Measure" into the sun and burn it into nothing. Paloma rubbed her fingertips along the ridged edges of the bite marks on her neck.

Vampires! Vampires and worst really did exist!

Paloma made up her mind. "Alright." She said to Basara."We'll work with the slayers for the time being." Paloma turned and watched the slayer named Surayya argue with the one called Buffy.

Both women were gesturing wildly and yelling at the top of their voice. Paloma observed them in the Bene Gesserit way. There was absolutely no threat of violence between them. Yet she knew, the slayers embodied lethal force in an extremely casual and organic way.

Paloma remembered the blood, guts and screams of berserker Lisa at Fish Speaker Command. Paloma remembered that Surayya had dropped a mountain down on Arrakis.

Paloma shuttered. She didn't know which was worst, the slayers or the monsters.

"You killed someone with a soul!" Surayya yelled at Buffy. She was upset that Buffy had beheaded Drusilla.

"I killed a _vampire_ with a soul!" Buffy said, "Very different thing."

"Drusilla was a victim in all this!" Surayya said.

"Yes, a victim that could tear your throat out, drink your blood and then feel _bad_ about it."

Surayya looked at Buffy as if she was a monster.

"Drusilla died ten thousand years ago. The Senior Partners trapped a demon in her resurrected flesh and Motorria forced her _soul_ to share space with mindless death. I did her a favor! The age of keeping the damned as pets is over."

"What about Angel! What about Spike!" Surayya shouted. She was getting angry.

"What about them? Angel was a victim of a curse who I know as a fact drank blood after he got his soul back. Spike was a demon who got a soul just to impress me. I would kill them both. No mercy."

What about me?" Surayya asked. "I am a slayer because I carry the essence of Spike. Am I a monster also?"

"The slayers are not monsters, yet. If slayers do become monsters I will be there. The Destroyer has given me my commission. I am the _permanent apocalypse_."

Surayya looked at Buffy. "We need to table this for now" Surayya said. "The burden of our calling may be our undoing."

"Yeah." Buffy said as she smiled. "Good thing we're hot chicks with superpowers. It takes the edge off."

Surayya ran her hand along her long raven colored hair in an unconscious grooming gesture. She had no idea what Buffy was talking about.

One ship had returned.

Of the fleet of assault ships she had sent against the slayers only one of them had returned and it was keeping radio silence. The ship entered one of the southern docking bays. It was one of the few docking bays that were covered from the Arrakis sun. Fleet Commander Arshia watched the stubby ship on the monitor.

The door to the ship opened. Even after long minutes no one exited the ship. After a few minutes, a member of the maintenance crew entered the ship. A few minutes later she exited and was soon followed by another, then another member of the maintenance crew.

"What's going on down there?" Arshia asked. She ordered security into the docking bay. Arshia watched her security team storm the ship. She could hear shots being fired over the monitor. Then dead silence. A tall, thin man exited the ship. He stood at the base of the loading ramp and stared directly into the bay cameras. Around him, the women he had in his thrall scurried to reload the ship with weapons. The man stepped forward and out of view of the camera. A moment later the doors to the central command opened. Dracula stepped forward and spoke to Supreme Commander Arshia.

"Your army is now at my command." Dracula said.

"Yes, Master." Arshia responded.

Dracula had assumed control of the Fish Speaker fleet.

Surayya was beeping.

The communications device given to her by the scoobies indicated an urgent message. Surayya palmed the small black square and read the words that came across its screen. It took her a moment to understand the words she was reading. She was having trouble switching gears. She and Buffy had just had an interesting conversation.

Buffy had decided to kill all monsters. Isn't that what slayers are suppose to do anyway?

Surayya finally focused on the words on the tiny screen before her. It took her a moment to notice that the sky was turning dark.

"Clouds? On Arrakis?" Surayya thought. She looked up. Her jaw dropped. The sky was covered with millions upon millions of slayer warships. The words she read on the screen hit home.

The screen said: The Slayer Fleet has returned to Arrakis. Above her head was enough fire power to turn the planet into ash. The ships moved slowly into position over sietch Kindle.

Dracula looked at the radar screens in the control center. The screen was a solid mass of ships.

"This is more like it." Dracula thought. "This is the war I have been dreaming of. I'm going to kill them all."


	11. Chapter 11

All characters from the Dune Universe are property of the Frank Herbert Estate. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

**The First** _[as __**Drusilla**__]_: ... Right from the beginning. And that's where we're going, ...

**The First** _[as the __**Master**__]_: ...right back to the beginning! Not the Bang. Not the Word. The _true_ beginning….You still don't get it. It's not about right. Not about wrong.

**The First** _[as Buffy]_: _It's about power._

BTVS, Season 7, "Lessons"

Over three million ships covered the sky. The bulk of the slayer fleet had returned to Arrakis.

Surayya watched, opened mouth, battleships as large as a cities, float silently before her and dotted between them were millions of smaller ships each larger than anything she had ever seen in her life. Other slayers were joining her, silently looking out at the terrible and awe inspiring power of the slayer fleet.

"Looks like there've been some upgrades…" Motorria said speaking her thoughts out loud. She stood next to Surayya.

The bulk of the ships of the fleet were gun metal black with veins of off grey shooting through them. Sunlight reflected off of hulls that seemed shiny and moist and almost organic in their texture. The ships looked terrifying like floating monsters. There were tens of thousands of visible weapons ports on each ship. The ships looked like they could tear open hell itself.

When bothered Surayya the most was the total lack of sound. Millions of ships floated overhead and the only sounds she could hear was the wind blowing across the sand.

"What have you _done_?" Surayya spoke into her communicator. Her voice trembled. The face of her former first officer, fleet commander Guerrero, filled the tiny screen. The fleet commander looked older than her twenty-five years. There were fresh scars on her face.

"The tools Leto left us with were not up to the task of taming the galaxy." She said. "The things we've seen in the dark, the tasks we've been asked to do, defy imagination. The horrors of.." Guerrero cut herself off. She switched subjects.

"These are the new _Hell Fighter_ class ships. " She said. "We can jump dimensions now. We've made it as far as Quor'Toth, the darkest of the dark worlds."

Surayya understood this new power of the slayers. They had become a major force in the galaxy. Surayya observed Buffy who stood to her right. Buffy was clenching and unclenching her fists as if fighting the urge to punch something.

Purple lightening flashed from the horizon to the fleet. Balls of golden white light popped in and out of existence throughout the ships. Commander Guerrero viewed screens that were off camera.

"Looks like Fish Speaker Command is shooting at us. Why would they do that?" She asked. Before Surayya could answer, the sky at the horizon was lit in white.

"_Atomics_? They would _dare_ use atomics?" Surayya thought. Events were speeding up, moving faster than she could comprehend. One question nagged at her mind.

"Commander, why are you here?" Surayya asked.

"He told us to come." Guerrero said. "Liam told us to come, now." The camera feeding the communicator images to Surayya panned to the left. It stopped on the image of a tall, dark and thin man with black hair and blue with blue eyes. Buffy and Motorria recognized him instantly. They both turned simultaneously to look at the baby lying in the crib. They both then looked at each other.

"That kid gets around." Buffy said.

"He does have access to higher spatial dimensions." said Motorria.

Surayya was not distracted. She still wanted an answer to her question.

"Commander, why are you here, _now_?" she asked again.

"Liam knows how to resurrect the Destroyer." Guerrero said. "And these are his words, he says he remembers how we did it _before_."

"Before what?" Surayya asked.

"Before _whenever_ he's from." Guerrero answered.

Liam stepped forward. It was oblivious that he was getting a better look at both Buffy and Motorria. Liam's handsome face looked at them for long moments. They could both see hints of grey in his hair.

"Mom, you look so young!" He said.

In the background, Surayya could hear Guerrero ordering troops into battle. Surayya listened to the battle chatter that came over the communicator. The chatter ended with screams. Guerrero slowly looked back at Surayya with anger on her face.

"You didn't tell me _Dracula_ was in charge of Fish Speaker command." She said with a forced calmness. Before Surayya could answer, Guerrero activated a full assault team. In the background, a small group of battle harden women scurried about claiming weapons that included the scythe, holy water and daylight spectrum grenades.

The assault team teleported down to the surface of the planet, followed by several hundred warships to provide cover.

"How do we do it?" Surayya asked. Tension was rising in her. "How do we bring the Destroyer back?"

"Do a reverse Rosenberg." Liam cut in. "In the last days of Sunnydale, Willow used the scythe to tap into the Destroyer and activate all the Potentials at the same time."

"Hey, that was my idea!" Buffy said.

"Who do you think told me about it?" Liam replied. "Anyway, you can use the combined energy signature of all the slayers focused through the scythe to punch a hole to where ever the essence of the Destroyer is hiding."

"Then the Destroyer will be resurrected?" Motorria asked.

"No." Answered Liam. "The Destroyer can never be resurrected. There is nothing to resurrect. The Destroyer is gone from this world."

"Then…" Surayya was confused.

"Moms, Surayya, slayers, you're going to have to give birth to him. You're not going to _resurrect_ the Destroyer. You're going to _create_ him. If we survive…"

"Survive what?" Surayya asked. Before anyone could answer green fire lit the sky. Thousands of rounds per second of armor piercing shells flew up from the ground. Surayya could hear the boom, boom, boom of the big guns of the Slayer fleet.

Liam looked at the screen panicked. "Mom! Shield the sietch now!" He screamed.

Motorria obeyed.

A moment later, the sky was lit with the blinding light of several one hundred gigaton nuclear warheads exploding. The first slayer fish speaker war had begun.


	12. Chapter 12

All characters from the Dune Universe are property of the Frank Herbert Estate. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

There's no secret to balance. You just have to feel the waves.

- Darwi Odrade

Motorria was breast feeding her son.

It was a peaceful moment for her. She had managed to make the shield around sietch kindle self sustaining so she took a break. She desperately wanted to bond with the child. She missed being with Liam. Over the last few months, as he gestated inside of her, a bond had begun to form between them through their long conversations. She looked for ways to spend time with him. Besides, it was his feeding time and she was the only one here who could handle that task. Liam's lips firmly pulled at her nipple as her warm milk flowed into him. For now, they were one being again.

Buffy looked at Motorria. She didn't know exactly how to feel. She knew intellectually that Motorria was the only one qualified to perform the biological duties of a mother yet she couldn't help but feel jealous and a little inadequate. She couldn't feed Liam from her body. Her breasts held no milk. Yet, she was compelled by magic to protect her bloodline. Buffy was glad the monks didn't give Dawn to her as a baby. There was no telling what she would have done to provide for a baby Dawn.

Motorria looked up at Buffy. She didn't need to be Bene Gesserit to know how the other woman felt. She could see the longing to connect in Buffy's eyes.

"Would you like to hold him?" Motorria asked Buffy. She could see Buffy's eyes light up.

The two women set close together. The small brown warm form of baby Liam nestled in Buffy's arm. He was yawning. He had a full belly. He was sleepy. All that was left was a belch and a poop and he could call it a full day.

"You know it's not at all creepy that you named the kid after my old boyfriend." Buffy said to Motorria. She was being sarcastic. "My old boyfriend, who went all crazy and tried to kill all of my friends, _then_ went on to run an evil law firm after we did the _nasty_."

"These were the memories that were the strongest." Motorria said. "The boy chose them. Besides, 'The Powers that Be' picked this moment to fulfill the promises made to him." Motorria stopped for a moment to think about what she just said. Her brows came together and her forehead wrinkled. She spoke a conclusion that was obvious to her. "Events on Arrakis are part of a larger pattern. Liam's past nastifications aside he is still Leto's half brother and the son of Paul Muad'dib." Motorria thought about what she had just said. "He is still a _Kwisatz Haderach_. He is still a male Bene Gesserit. At some point we have to decide when to start feeding him spice."

"Yeah, about that, how is that possible?" Buffy asked. "The Muad'dib I met aboard "Her Graceful Measure" was just a construct, materialized memory. How can a memory have genes?" Buffy was really concerned about this.

"Sineya told us that we were not just a nexus, but an ultra-nexus. Thanks to Spike, we are mystically connected to a large region of space time. The joining spell took our memories too literately and joined everything we are and everything we've ever touched and made it real. Apparently, even down to the genetic level."

Buffy fished around in the pockets of her white battle suit and pulled out the Gem of Amara. She made sure not to disturb baby Liam. Buffy had retrieved the ring after beheading Drusilla.

"I just realized something.' Buffy said. She held the Gem of Amara in her palm. "This ring was worn by Spike on 'Her Graceful Measure'. That Spike was a living memory created by us when we were under the joining spell."

"Yes, so what." Motorria said.

"We recreated Spike, the Gem of Amara and the _magics_ of the Gem of Amara! _We created magic_ just by remembering it."

Motorria digested the implications of that statement. It opened up new possibilities for her resurrection of the Destroyer.

"Won't help us." Motorria said. "Previously, we were using the Destroyer as a power source. The Destroyer is a profound source of mystical energy. In this case, we're trying to _create_ a source of mystical…" Motorria's voice trailed off.

"What if all the slayers pooled their energies and funneled it through the scythe back to the dimension of the Destroyer?" Motorria said. "A reverse Rosenberg!"

"Shhhhh!" Buffy said. "You're wake the baby. Besides, didn't Liam already say that?"

Motorria rolled her eyes. "Details Buffy, Details."

The Slayer-Fishspeaker was in full bloom.

Surayya could see, through the haze of Motorria's shield, the intense air battle surrounding the slayer fleet. Pink, green and white balls of light rapidly flashed into existence and faded as missiles exploded in mid air. Surayya ignored it. She had heard Motorria's proposition. They needed to know if such a thing was possible. They needed to know if it was possible for slayers to merge together the tiny spark of the Destroyer that each one of them carried. To that end, Surayya and a few other slayers sat in a circle on the floor of the sietch. They focused their awareness inward under the influence of spice.

Mother Superior Paloma observed them quietly. She saw that their meditation techniques needed polish. "How long has it been since these women had been to a chapterhouse?" She wondered. "The Bene Gesserit could be of great help to the slayers." She thought. "And once they're dependant on us, the slayers will be ours to control." Paloma smiled. She stepped forward and offered her assistance in helping the slayers meditate. One by one the women took small sips pure spice essence in preparation for the journey inwards.

"Let's begin with focusing on our center." Paloma said. "Listen to the blood music of the body. Drift deeper into yourself." The voice of the reverend mother droned on. She was intentionally using her voice rhythm and cadence to hypnotize them. "Build your catalog. Catalog every nuance of your body." Paloma waited a few moments. "Now look for the thing that does not match. Look for the thing that has a mind of its own. Find the alien sprit within."

The spice hit Surayya hard. She felt as she was falling down an infinite well. She had trained in free fall at Leto's academy many times. She adjusted to the feeling quickly. She used her mentat training to build a holographic database of every part of herself and held it inside of her mind. The spice kicked her. A vision of the future slammed into her mind. Surayya was Atreides. She had a particular affinity for the spice. As a feeling of warmth moved over her she saw herself and Buffy locked in mortal combat. They had their hands wrapped tightly around each other's throats. Where ever they were it was raining. Fat drops of water covered the murderous grimaces of their faces.

Surayya opened her eyes.

From the belly of each of the slayers came a thin wisp of golden white light that emanated and coiled together in the center of them like a clutch of snakes. The energies of the Destroyer came out of them and fused together to create a greater whole.

Surayya looked over at Buffy, who stood outside the circle watching with saucer wide eyes.

"One day, I may have to kill her." Surayya thought to herself. She found that thought disturbing.

Motorria chanted as she guided the fused energy of the Destroyer towards her scythe. The scythe began to glow reddish green. Every slayer in the sietch felt it. For a brief moment, it felt like the Destroyer was back. The skin of every slayer was covered with goose bumps. There were a few silent tears.

Paloma brought them out of the trance. The slayers looked at each other. They were all very smart. They all instantly knew what they had to do next.

Surayya flipped open her communicator. She was trying to reach the fleet commander. Her communicator only generated static.

"No help from the fleet." Surayya said. She folded her communicator and put it away. "We're going to have to do this ourselves." Buffy was trying to keep up with the conversation. She didn't like the feel of where this was going.

"Moto, we need you here for the magics. You can't go with us." Surayya was back in command mode. She grabbed her scythe as she began to move towards Buffy.

"We need a primer." She said. "We need a profound source of mystical energy to kick start the reaction."

"Let's get Dracula." Buffy said surprising herself at how quickly that thought came to her.

"Our thoughts exactly." Surayya said not aware of the strangeness of her phrasing. "Once we get Dracula back here that should stop the fighting. Then, all the slayers can focus their energy together." Surayya stopped, turned and looked around the sietch. She raised her voice to all to hear.

"We, all of us together, have lost something great. We have lost the organizing principle of our lives. But I tell you this, today the Destroyer will return and we will be whole!" She raised her scythe. The sietch roared in agreement.

Minutes later.

"So let me get this straight." Buffy said. "We are going to put our lives at stake to save Dracula from the slayers so that we can sacrifice him in order to bring back the destroyer of all things supernatural?"

"Yes." Surayya said flatly.

"Ok." Buffy said. "Just wanted to make sure that we were on the same page."

Surayya grabbed Buffy and teleported out.


	13. Chapter 13

All characters from the Dune Universe are property of the Frank Herbert Estate. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

Endurance. Belief. Patience. Hope. These are the key words of our existence.

**Zensunni prayer**

Motorria readied herself for the return of the Destroyer. She gathered together various charms and objects and placed them into the sacred circle. She thought about what had to be done. She was going to merge the tiny sparks of the Destroyer, gathered from the slayers, and focus that energy into the scythe. She held her scythe in her hand and thought about the history of the weapon.

The original scythe was given to the Guardians by the Senior Partners as a way to control the slayers. Willow Rosenberg used the scythe to channel energy from the Destroyer to activate the Potential slayers.

"And when we launched our attack on "Her Graceful Measure" Sineya the God Worm scattered us throughout time to gather the scythe." Motorria thought to herself as she looked around the cave at the various slayers and their version of the scythe. She was constantly amazed and awed that every slayer in the fleet had the same scythe, the _exact_ same and only scythe gathered from different points in the past.

"One day someone has to return the scythe to all of its places in the past. Else, we would cease to exist." Motorria thought.

She counted the various beads and crystals as her mind worked on other problems. Part of her thought about ways to solve certain issues in n-dimensional spatial folding, while part of her kept an eye on Liam and wondered, like all mothers, what sort of man her son would grow up to be. The sietch trembled as terrific forces splattered against it as a spill off from the Slayer-Fishspeaker war. For a moment, Motorria seriously considered just grabbing the kid and teleporting the hell away from here. She smiled to herself as that feeling faded.

"Just you and me kid." She thought. "Just us two against the world." She smiled as she let that thought go and returned her focus to the task at hand.

"A woman's work is never done." She signed to herself

Supreme reverend mother Paloma approached her. She was still shaken and in awe at what she had just witnessed. The ancient writings of the Bene Gesserit spoke of such power buried within women but until now she thought it was just a myth. The Bene Gesserit used the power of meditation and training to sharpen the functioning of the body. To the masses, that gave them the appearance of being powerful beings. But these slayers, they actually had a secret power buried within them! They were the real thing!

"You won't have enough." Paloma said as she approached Motorria who looked up at her surprised at her statement. "You won't have enough slayers in the sietch to invoke the Destroyer." Paloma had read the classified reports on the Destroyer. It was a being of _singular_ power. During the blood storm, when Surayya had landed a mountain on Arrakis, the Destroyer had wiped out, in the blink of an eye, over two hundred million demons that had escaped from the Hellmouth created by the Senior Partners.

"You don't have enough slayers." Paloma said again. She wanted the slayers to succeed but she had no hope that they would.

"Well then." Motorria said to her. "We'll have to just find more." Motorria thought for a moment then said. "We just have to find them _all_."

There were bodies everywhere.

Buffy and Surayya appeared in a flash of light deep inside Fish Speaker Command. They were just outside the main command center. The floor was covered in thick white gray fog. They believed Dracula lay beyond the thick blood covered walls before them. Around them were the twisted and mangled bodies of both slayers and fish speakers. A horrific battle had occurred here.

Neither women spoke as they stepped over the bodies. Surayya desperately tried to not look at the faces of the slain slayers. She did not want to recognize any of her old friends among the dead. They were only a few meters away from the bulkhead to the command center when they felt the vibration of mystical forces behind them.

In the space behind them an eldritch light flared green as something tall and thin appeared. Surayya didn't wait. She pulled her scythe and lunged towards the stranger.

He was fast.

The stranger twisted out of the path of Surayya too fast for the eye to follow. As he moved, he pivoted, he turned, he twisted his body and brought his foot up in a roundhouse kick to the back of Surayya's head. Surayya stumbled forward. As she fell, the stranger moved again and grabbed her before she hit the ground.

Surayya was still in shock. Her body recognized the stranger before her mind did. The stranger pulled back his hood. Blue within blue eyes looked out at Buffy and Surayya.

"Auntie Surayya, your getting slow in your old age." He said. Liam looked over at Buffy. "Hi Mom, long time no see."

Liam smiled a crooked smile. And for a split second he looked exactly like Angel. Buffy shivered as a memory overwhelmed her.

It was the night Ms. Calendar had died. She had gotten a call from Giles with the bad news. She remembered how she sunk to the floor in grief. She knew evil was real but this was the first time it had taken someone she cared about. It was the first time evil had touched her personally. She wasn't even conscious of it, but in that moment she began to _hate_ evil.

She was totally unaware that the Destroyer had build upon that memory.

Buffy snapped out of the memory. Liam was standing directly before her. He was taller than her. He wore a black armored stillsuit similar to the ones worn by the slayers when they left her all alone atop the god worm a lifetime ago. Buffy could smell him. His musk was masculine. Mixed with it were the smells of the desert and the cinnamon of spice. Her body recognized the power he contained, it became aroused.

Buffy blushed and took a step back.

"We have a lot to talk about." Liam said to her. "But now is not the time. I'm here to help you retrieve Dracula." Liam said to both Surayya and Buffy. Liam looked at Buffy as his expression became darker. "And to help you mother, understand certain things about what we are going to do here."

"Well, well here we are." He said. "A fateful trinity."

Surayya looked over at Liam sharply. Her Bene Gesserit training had made her sensitive to voice stress tones. The way Liam had spoke the word _trinity_ held a undercoat of sadness about it. She made a promise to herself to ask him about it later.

Does anyone here have a battle plan?" He said.

The fog in the room covering the still bleeding bodies of both slayers and fish speakers began to shift and morph itself into the shape of a man.

"How about this." Dracula said as regained his full form. "How about you all die."

"Here we go." Liam thought to himself as memories of this moment came back to him.


	14. Chapter 14

All characters from the Dune Universe are property of the Frank Herbert Estate. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

The Fremen see her as the Earth Figure, a demi-goddess whose special charge is to protect the tribes through her powers of violence. She is Reverend Mother to their Reverend Mothers. To pilgrims who seek her out with demands that she restore virility or make the barren fruitful, she is a form of anti-mentat. She feeds on that proof that the "analytic" has limits. She represents ultimate tension. She is the virgin-harlot—witty, vulgar, cruel, and as destructive in her whims as a corollas storm.

-The Slayer directive as recorded by the cult of St. Alia of the Knife

They spread out around the lord of the undead. Liam, Surayya and Buffy placed an arm's length distance between them at the sudden appearance of Dracula. The tension in the cold blood soaked room jumped a notch. They could all feel the pure menace radiating from the vampire. Dracula growled at them. His face was cold white and dead of any expressions.

"We meet again child." He said to Surayya. "You called me a stupid monster and left me in the desert to burn." Dracula shifted his weight to move into striking position.

"I will eat your guts while you scream." He said flatly. "And you..." He said to Buffy. "I am not your _grandfather_. I am the darkness _personified_, the grand ghoul. I am the master of the night and of all beings both living and undead. You and I are the same." He said. "If you were dead, by what dwells within you would make you a vampire. Know this Buffy, you are one of us. This is what the Destroyer feared. The slayers would come to recognize that they too are monsters and that they would come to embrace the darkness greatly."

Dracula watched the faces of the slayers as he saw his words take effect. He could see his barbs sinking in creating enough doubts to get them killed. Dracula knew how to mix truth and lies together so that one could not be told from the other.

"He lies." Surayya said. 'We are not monsters. Liam remained silent. He waited for what came next. Buffy rolled her eyes before she spoke.

"We sweat, we bleed, we're mortal, and we die. We are flesh, and we carry the mandate of Heaven. We feel love and pain and anger and right now we're pissed. You're a dead man feeding off the living. You've lost the mission of heaven. You are a renegade!" Buffy yelled across the room. "You have betrayed the purpose of the Destroyer! The vital difference between us is this. We still have work to do and you simply don't matter anymore." Buffy flipped the pointed end of the scythe forward and charged into battle.

She stabbed the air where Dracula had been a moment ago. In a blur of motion, Dracula twisted out of her way. He grabbed her and threw her against the dirty walls of the keep with one hand. Buffy slammed into the chambers walls with a loud woof. She felt the wind knocked out of her. She tried to stand but couldn't, Buffy slumped down to one knee as blackness clouded her vision.

Before Buffy hit the wall, Surayya lunged into the fray. She swung the blade of her scythe across Dracula's chest and missed. Dracula pivoted and caught her under her jawbone with his razor sharp claws. With both his hands Dracula pulled Surayya towards him. Surayya made a sound like a wounded animal before her Bene Gesserit training kicked in. She used her mind to filter out the pain. Dracula opened his mouth revealing his fangs. His face was twisted into a cruel visage revealing his total desire to consume her. Surayya's blood ran down his arm. Surayya clapped her hands together and drove them upwards into the space between Dracula's arms. She inhaled deeply supercharging her blood stream with oxygen. She ordered her adrenaline gland to kick into overdrive. Her back arched in ecstasy as raw power flowed through her. Her arms exploded outward forcing Dracula to release her. In the space of a moment, Surayya drove her finger tips into Dracula's neck. The Lord of the undead fell backwards.

Her feet touched the ground.

Surayya dropped into an attack stance and growled. The tendons on the back of her legs were rock hard. It happened just before she jumped. Liam came out of nowhere. His movement was a blur. He punched Dracula in the face with a solid right cross, then dipped his shoulder then punched Dracula again with a left upper-cut. Dracula was reeling. Liam slammed both hands, open palmed, into Dracula knocking him against the chamber wall and in a blink of an eye punched him in the ribs hard enough to shatter his ribcage. They could all hear the sound of breaking bone.

The Lord of the undead screamed. His yellowish red rimmed eyes showed his anger. Dracula savagely brought his elbow down on Liam's head then knocked him to the ground. He was through playing games with these children. He would teach them a bloody lesson.

He would start with Buffy first. Dracula retrieved the scythe from where Buffy had dropped it. He walked over to her, where she lay slumped against the wall. With the back of his hand, Dracula knocked her to the ground. Stood over her then rammed the tip the scythe through her. Buffy's blood splashed as the wood shaft entered her chest and stabbed her heart. Blood flooded out of her mouth as she died.

Surayya screamed as she saw the light fade from Buffy's eyes. Blackness ate away at the edge of her vision as her own berserker mode came upon her.

"Damn you!" Surayya said. Her voice was choked with sadness and anger. Dracula spoke in the darkest tone Hell could muster.

"I'm going to rape your flesh and then make you drown in your own blood." He said.

Dracula leapt the space between them knocking Surayya to the ground. He had her pinned down with his full weight on her chest. Dracula bared his teeth, and then swung down to bite her.

An explosion of yellow white light filled the chamber. The pressure wave knocked Dracula clear across the room and slammed him against the far wall. The entire building shook. Dust fell from the ceiling.

"I'd like to test that theory." Buffy said back from the dead holding her scythe in her hand. Her white battle suit sparked with purple streamers of mystical energy. Her eyes glowed orange. "We are slayers. You cannot hope to grasp the source or magnitude of our power." Buffy walked slowly across the room towards Dracula. Her wound was completely healed.

"A _permanent _apocalypse!" Surayya thought. "_This_ is what the Destroyer had intended?"

Surayya twisted her body as she got to her feet. She made her way towards Liam.

"The Destroyer mentioned that the slayers were still evolving." Surayya thought. "His greatest fear was that we would become like the Old Ones, that our powers would give us a vanity that would turn us to evil." Surayya helped Liam back on his feet. "Is that what Buffy is for? Is she now the slayer of slayers? Is she here to keep us on the straight and narrow?"

Liam stood next to Surayya. Everything had gone as it had been told to him by his mother. He knew exactly what Surayya was thinking at this moment.

"Buffy is only part of it." Liam said. The Destroyer created a two tier system of control. One tier for influence, the second tier is for punishment."

Surayya looked at him for a moment as the pieces came together.

"You are the first tier?" Surayya said to him.

"Yes." Liam said back. "Like my brother and my father before me, I have access to the pre birth memories in my body as well as the nexus of memory-beings outside my body. Have you noticed that the only time you see me is in the presence of slayers? The connection for me between memory and space and time is a mobius strip. One leads to the other. Surayya, I am inside of you. I am inside of you all."

Surayya looked at him in awe and wonder.

"I think mom needs your help now." Liam said as he gently turned her head back to Buffy and Dracula. Surayya suddenly remembered how badly she wanted to kill him. She could feel her blood boiling. Surayya watched Buffy lunge forward with the tip of the scythe into the heart of darkness. Dracula turned into living smoke. Her scythe went right through him. The cloud of smoke that was Dracula turned towards the ventilation system.

"No you don't!" Surayya said. Her frustrations peaked. Something inside of her awoke. Mystical energies radiated from her arms. The cloud darkness that was Dracula froze in mid-air.

"She did an Illyria!" Buffy thought. Her eyes were as wide as saucers.

The three warriors gathered around the frozen smoke. They looked at each other silently. Liam knew what each woman was thinking. He spoke to Surayya first. "I am connected to all of Leto's slayers. I am your shepherd. Mother and I are a system of control. With power, the slayers must be domesticated." Liam then said to Surayya after a moment. "I'm sorry auntie."

They stood together in silence then teleported out.


	15. Chapter 15

All characters from the Dune Universe are property of the Frank Herbert Estate. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

Life — all life — is in the service of life

Kynes

They appeared in a flash of light. The heroes returned to sietch kindle with their prey. Buffy, Surayya, Liam, and Dracula as a column of frozen smoke, appeared in the sietch. Motorria tried not to let her jaw drop.

"How the hell did they do that?" She thought. She was expecting them to return with Dracula in chains, not looking like an impossible thing hanging in mid-air. Surayya caught her look. She would explain it to her later. Motorria began to pack the ingredients necessary for the return of the Destroyer and move everything to where the column of frozen smoke hung in the air.

There was no way they were going to unfreeze Dracula.

Surayya could feel Buffy starring at the back of her neck. With the new information Liam had given her, she understood why Buffy was reacting so badly. Now she understood why she had killed Drusilla even after she had gotten her soul back. Surayya turned her head and spoke to Buffy.

"I am not a _monster_." She said. Surayya stared a Buffy a moment waiting to make sure what she just said had sunk in. Buffy was silent. Surayya could tell she was thinking. Surayya observed Buffy's lips and the way she held them moist and apart with a slight tension.

"She's making a decision." Surayya thought. "She's making a terrible decision."

Buffy cut her eyes at Surayya for one long moment before she turned and walked away. Surayya turned to Liam. She grabbed his arm and pulled him to one side.

"Tell me what you meant by _Trinity_." She said.

Liam twisted his head, as if relaxing muscles in his neck, before he spoke. Surayya could tell that something terrible had just crossed his mind. Liam was a full six inches taller than Surayya. He bent his head down to whisper to her.

"A Trinity is a unity. It is the expression of the three aspects of the unified divine." He said. "A trinity is not three things but three aspects of a greater thing."

Surayya motioned she understood.

"In the years to come, history will be written by such aspects of the divine. Sometimes these aspects will work against each other for the greater good. Sometimes these conflicts will be personal and painful. The Slayers, the Bene Gesserit and the Fish Speakers will be one such trinity. The Destroyer, the Slayers and the Human race will be another."

"But what will be the one you spoke of at Fish Speaker Command. The one you called a _fateful_ trinity?"

Liam placed his arms around Surayya and hugged her tightly.

"It will be us." Liam said. His voice was racked with sorrow. "It will be you, mother and I. She speaks of herself as the law. But, you can't have a law _keeper_ without a law _breaker_."

Surayya understood what Liam was saying. She knew then her role in the events to come.

"Will I have any choice?" Surayya asked.

Liam frowned. "I have crossed the time lines dozens of times. The variations are so small as to not matter. We are a Tokria, a confluence of events and choices that always, always, lead to the same bloody conclusion.

"What is that conclusion?" Surayya asked. She could feel the soft edges of fear creeping up on her.

"It always ends the same. You and Buffy kill each other and out of that comes a slayer civil war that lasts for ten thousand years. When that war is finished, precious little remains of the Human race. Every known world is left a blacken ball burned nearly to the core."

"No." Surayya said flatly. "Now I know. I won't let it happen. Now that I know, I can avoid the future you spoke of. Now that I know, I can fight the future."

Liam almost laughed.

"Ah, Auntie." Liam said in mock sorrow. "This is the thirty-seventh time, from my point of view; I've told you what was to come." Liam palmed Surayya's face in his warm hands. "It has never made a difference. Things always end the same."

Surayya remembered the spice vision she had of her and Buffy strangling each other in the rain.

"Never! Never! I will never allow that to happen!" Surayya thought as she backed away from Liam.

Surayya made her way to the entrance of the Sietch and looked out over the charred ruins of the Arrakis desert. The sky will filled with black oily smoke. Burning war machines littered the landscape. There were female bodies strewed across the desert. She could smell burning oil and flesh and hear, very faintly, the moans of agony from the thousands of women dying in the desert. Surayya imagined every human world in such sad condition. She imagined the slayers as the source of such suffering.

"_**There is no escape — we pay for the violence of our ancestors**_." Surayya could hear the voice of Muad'dib within her. A small tear formed in the corner of her eye.

"No moisture for the dead." The Paul within her said.

That's when she made up her mind. Surayya swore an oath to herself at that moment to fight the future. Lisa strolled up next to her and placed an arm around her waist. She pulled Surayya close to her and said as she observed the ruined landscape.

"Well, at least the war is over."

Surayya placed an arm around Lisa's neck and laid her head on her shoulder.

"You have no idea how wrong you are." Surayya thought.

Surayya's communicator beeped. It was Fleet Commander Guerrero. Surayya listened to her speak. The Fish Speakers had surrendered. The Fish Speakers were negotiating their surrender.

The meeting was over fairly quickly. The Fish Speakers no longer wanted to fight since Dracula was no longer in control of the fleet and the slayers no longer had to defend themselves against an unprovoked attack. Surayya ran her hands over the polished wood table imported from Caladan. She was back in the ridiculously large room with the huge windows where Lisa, Buffy and her had been attacked. Most of the blood had been cleaned off the walls.

Surayya held a simple document in front of her. There were many details and legalisms to work out but the document simply stated that the slayers were the total, final and absolute authority on anything supernatural. Surayya signed her name to the document and then passed it to Fleet commander Guerrero who signed it then passed it to Mother Superior Paloma. Finally, it was presented to Supreme Commander Arlene. She signed the document frowning all the while.

The Slayers, Fish Speakers and Bene Gesserit were now one. No sooner had the document been signed when every communicator in the room began to beep. It was Motorria. The ritual to restore the Destroyer had begun.


	16. Chapter 16

All characters from the Dune Universe are property of the Frank Herbert Estate. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

**"Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Normal Again (#6.17)"**** (2002)**

_Joyce Summers_: I know you're afraid. I know the world feels like a hard place, sometimes. But you've got people who love you. Your dad and I, we have all the faith in the world in you. We'll always be with you. You have got a world of strength in your heart. I know you do. You just have to find it again. Believe in yourself.

Liam liked playing with himself.

He let the baby squeeze his finger as he smiled down at himself. Playing with his younger version was not strange to him at all. It certainly wasn't the last time he would do so. Liam looked up at the sound of his mother approaching. He knew exactly what Motorria was going to say and do next. He had experienced this moment dozens of times before.

His came from a bad place.

Liam remembered every time-line he changed when he travelled back to his past. He remembered the dark and terrifying world of the blood storm that was negated by Surayya when she closed the Arrakis Hellmouth. He remembered taking the spice over dose and being forced to travel back to his past just in time to see Buffy emerge from the Destroyer. He was only five at the time. Of course there was a price to pay.

He experienced things that never existed.

Since Surayya had closed the Arrakis Hellmouth and prevented Arrakis from being flooded with _billions_ of ubervamps there was no reason for him to travel back in time in the first place. But he remembered doing so. Nothing escaped him.

Liam was the kwisatz haderach. He embraced multiple dimensions of both space and time. He was omnipresent. That made him a god with a lower case 'g'. Liam could focus his mind and body to bridge any point in the multiverse. He had seen thousands of parallel worlds. He had even seen a world that consisted of nothing but shrimp. To him, nothing was ever really lost. The basic flaw of the kwisatz haderach was that he could never forget.

Liam ran the tips of his fingers over his baby face.

The child smiled. Motorria stood across from him on the other side of the baby's crib. She had _that_ expression on her face. The one she'd always use whenever he did something profound or terrifying. It was the same expression she would use the first time he used the Voice on her or came back bloody from training with Surayya. It was the same expression she'd use the time he ordered the extermination of an entire race during the Shadow wars. He knew every word she was going to say next. That was ok. Liam loved his strange mother.

Their eyes met for a moment. Liam could see something break within her. Motorria rushed over to him and grabbed him firmly. It was like all the times before. This moment was like a song that played itself over and over again without variation. It drove him mad. He felt himself locked into an eternal moment that would never end. Liam feared he would be trapped in this temporal loop forever. He was beginning to feel the weight of it. He knew what was going to come next.

Motorria sniffed him. She pulled his head down so that she could smell his hair and then his face and then his clothing. She was searching, desperately searching for some scent, some sign that he was hers. As if on cue, Motorria relaxed as she cradled her head on his shoulder.

"Are you my boy?" She asked. Liam gave her the same answer he had given her dozens of times before.

"Yes Mother, I'll always be your boy."

As he held his mother, Liam looked down at himself laying in his crib wrapped in the Arteries battle flag. That very same flag would fly over the ruins of many burning worlds.

"What? What is it?" Motorria whispered to him. She didn't need to be Bene Gesserit. She was a mother. She could tell when her baby was in trouble.

"I'm so tired." Liam said. "I've been searching the multiverse for something… for something to end the coming darkness." Motorria pulled slightly away and looked hard at him trying to hear the sounds between the words.

Around them, the slayers were getting ready for the return of the Destroyer. Commander Guerrero had sent over some witch-slayers from the fleet. Motorria was not the only one with power. In the years since Tailos Three, the slayer fleet had found and nurtured a special corps of slayers with magical abilities. In the entire fleet there were less than twenty of them. Three of them were in the sietch with Motorria preparing for the return of the Destroyer.

The organic remains of the Destroyer, kept in a cryogenic locker, had been moved outside into the desert. Motorria hoped it would serve as an organic template for the Destroyer's sprit. She had no idea how he would use it to recreate a body. Motorria knew that flesh was essentially a soul cage, that the body was technology used to house spiritual forces so that they could move around in this dimension.

She hoped the flesh they provided would be good enough to capture the spirit of the Destroyer upon its manifestation.

The witch-slayers had also set up a sacred circle with the scythe in the middle of the circle and Dracula as a plume of frozen smoke directly above it. Motorria never got tired of seeing that black column of smoke just hanging in the air. It looked weird as hell.

The witch-slayers sat outside in the desert and began chanting. Motorria had a few minutes until the main event.

"Liam, what's bothering you?" Motorria asked as she looked into his eyes. Even thought she didn't know it, this was the very first time Motorria was to offer her son any advice.

"I've been through this moment dozens of times and nothing changes." Liam said. "I was able to stop the blood storm by interfering with the past, but this, this is impossible to change; the universe wants a conflict between Buffy and Surayya. I love them both. I can't stand to lose them." He said Motorria could hear the sadness in his voice.

"Just accept it." Motorria said. "Sometimes, you have to accept the things you cannot change." This was the advice she had given him dozens of times before. He had ignored it every time.

"I can't…" He was about to say.

"You've got to." Motorria said softly but strongly. "You've got to learn how to let go. If the past is keeping you locked in a temporal loop, then let it go. Embrace the change no matter how terrible."

Liam understood. He decided to listen to his mother this time. And in the moment he decided to let go of the two people he loved the most in the world he felt a huge weight lift off of him and that changed everything.

Motorria opened her communicator and sent the pre arranged message to everyone at the peace conference.

"It's time." Motorria said to Liam.

She took his hand and led him out into the desert.


	17. Chapter 17

All characters from the Dune Universe are property of the Frank Herbert Estate. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

"A slayer is not just a soldier on the front lines of a nightly war. A slayer is an avatar of a force beyond comprehension."

Leto Atreides

"A Form of Eternity"

Liam walked outside into the desert. Everything was just as he remembered. The sky was clear blue and cloudless. The witch-slayers, on loan from the fleet, were busy chanting in the sacred circle. His mother had gone on a few steps ahead of him. Surayya, Buffy and a few other slayers stood outside the circle watching anxiously.

Everything was exactly as it had occurred dozens of times before. This was the day everything changed and the wars began. Liam did something that he had never done before in the dozens of times he had come here. He changed his mind. Liam decided to do something different. He had taken his mothers advice to heart. He wanted to share it with Surayya. Perhaps it would make a difference. He walked up behind her and rubbed his hand along her back. He remembered she liked that. Surayya looked up at him. He could see the anxiety on her face.

"Motorria told me something you should hear." Liam said to her. Surayya turned to face Liam. "She said that after you try everything; sometimes you just have to accept things the way they are, you have to _acclimate_ to the changes."

"_Acclimate_?" Surayya thought. She recognized it as an ecological term. Leit-Kynes had used that term often when discussing the ecology of Arrakis.

"**The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realize about an ecosystem is that it's a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche.** A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams the flow, order collapses. The untrained miss the collapse until too late. That's why **the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences."**

Surayya remembered the long lectures at the academy in the care free days before Tailos Three.

"Air, water, weeds, grass, sky, it was all about balance." Surayya realized. It was all about finding a unified whole, a synergy, a trinity.

"I'll remember." She said to Liam. Suddenly she felt better, as if something wonderful had just happened.

"_Ostendere veram essentiam_" Motorria said. The ritual had begun.

"Something else." Liam continued as he leaned into Surayya and whispered into her ear. "Try not to break my arm so many times during training." He said. Surayya smiled.

"Deal." She said.

A plume of orange white fire leapt up from the scythe. Motorria had invoked the powers contained within the weapon. The orange white fire lapped at the base of the column of smoke frozen in mid air that was Dracula. Motorria turned and looked at Surayya then Buffy.

"Any last words for him?" Motorria asked.

Buffy rolled her eyes then looked away. Surayya remained silent.

"Very well." Motorria said. She turned back to her ritual and said "_exponere essentia_!" The column of smoke that was Dracula flashed green then white as the true essence of the force behind the supernatural was revealed.

It was beautiful. It was pure. It was beyond good and evil. The scythe-fire leapt forth and embraced it supercharging its magics.

"Bring your sacrifices." Motorria said to the other slayers. One by one the slayers sat in the sand and meditated. Shortly afterwards, this streams of golden white light flowed from their bellies to the scythe. From the slayer fleet, thousands of streams of golden white light converged at the scythe. The sky looked like a swarm of fireflies. The mystic flame grew larger. It shot upwards tens of meters.

"Not enough!" Motorria thought. "There's not enough of us to bring forth the Destroyer!" Motorria panicked. Liam stepped forward and gently squeezed her arm.

"Mother, we're going to need them _all_. We're going to need _all_ of the slayers." Motorria looked at him puzzled. Liam took his lexan knife and sliced open the palm of his hand. He flicked his blood onto the burning scythe. It sparkled but did not burn.

"I was built to locate slayers _anywhere_ in the universe." He said to her. "Ubi es" Liam said. He had spoken the simplest locater spell her knew. He simply asked the burning sky "Where are you?"

Fueled by his blood, the locator spell exploded into every point in space and time. It echoed backwards four billion years into the past and twenty billion years into the future. Like a hound dog, it searched the infinite multiverse for every slayer it could find.

It found them. It found them _all_.

"Now mother, ask them, ask them the question." Liam said. Motorria asked the question and waited for the answer.

On a rainy night, on a dark desert road, Faith Lehane heard a voice speaking to her. She was on her way back to Sunnydale to handle some business with Buffy. A stranger had been kind enough to give her his car after she had shattered his skull with a lead pipe. Being a slayer didn't save her from human weakness. In some ways it made things worse. She had both power and frailty. Now everything she did carried serious consequences.

The voice spoke to her softly. It asked the same question over and over again waiting for her to answer. Faith drove down that dark road a fair piece before she finally gave her answer.

Sineya rammed the stake into the heart of the vampire. She stepped back as it exploded into smoke. This was the third vampire she had staked tonight. There must be something special in the air. When the Old Mother rolled the bones the signs alpha and omega, life and death came up over and over again. This was the third vampire she had killed tonight on all nights. Today was her birthday. She was missing her own party! She had been a slayer for less than six months. It was six months ago that her beloved had opened his skin and shared his sprit with her. As the dust settled, Sineya heard a voice asking her a question, the same question over and over. Sineya did not hesitate. She gave her answer.

Buffy fell into a circle of light. She launched herself into the void with her eyes wide open. Dawn had been bled. The only thing that could close the portal was summers blood, her blood. "Be brave, Dawn, live, for me." She told her sister. As Buffy fell, she could hear the sweetest voice talking to her asking her a question. Shearing pain burned through her as mystical forces began tearing her apart. Buffy focused through the pain. She felt it important to give her answer.

Twenty billion years in the future, on a grey black rocky planet under a swollen red star, the last slayer stood and stretched out her four arms. After billions of years, it was surprising there was so little change in the human structure. She stood beneath a dying star bathed in hard nuclear radiation and felt right at home. She knew this moment was coming. She had seen it in her dreams every since she was a little girl thousands of years ago. The last slayer listened to a voice out of history and gave her answer.

The question was "Will you help us?" The resounding answer was _yes_!

"I think they heard me." Motorria said.

They felt it before they saw it. The blue sky flashed white as the combined spiritual energies of _billions_ of slayers converged on the scythe. That was enough. The sacred fire jumped thousands of kilometers into the air. A pillar of fire punched into the sky, past the atmosphere into the vacuum of space.

That's when she appeared.

Called from dimensions past knowing, Saint Lucilla of sietch Kindle appeared. She had heard the call and came as quickly as she could from a dimension that resembled heaven. There was no one to see her in the cold dark of space but if someone could they would swear that she resembled the terrible Angels of old. She was a ball of luminous fire nearly three hundred kilometer across.

Lucilla pointed the tip of one of her fingers at the top of the flame and sliced open space itself. The energies of the slayers poured into the dimension set aside by higher powers for this moment. She looked down on the brown surface of Arrakis and remembered being alive there. She was beyond that now. She was beyond the trivial concerns of the mortal life.

Lucilla flapped her wings once and returned to the land beyond the sky.


	18. Chapter 18

All characters from the Dune Universe are property of the Frank Herbert Estate. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

"We live in the tug-of-war between creation and destruction, life and death, order and chaos. Surmounting that tension is the highest function of life. The living cell learns to swim, to dance, to walk, to fly. Life is an adaptive mechanism and the universe has only one demand. Evolve or die.

Leto II

Notes from his first year of sand trout transformation.

The energies exploded into an _uncreated_ space.

The combined spiritual energies of billions of slayers were directed here by Saint Lucilla. This was a place where _entropy_ had no rein. This was a closed space where order increased over time. The energy increased in strength a trillion times, and then a fraction of a second later doubled in strength again. The energy pushed back the boundaries of dimensionality. Out of a singularity came one dimension, then two, then three, then twenty six spatial dimensions.

And still the energies of the slayers could not be stopped.

When the dimensionality of this place could no longer be explored the energy folded back onto itself and began to interact with itself. It formed stable inference patterns where it stored and processed infinite amount of information. In this place, where there was no chaos and no death, the inference patterns became fixed and dynamic. Information could be processed and stored.

The mind of the Destroyer was born.

And when that mind had explored and cataloged and understood everything it could in its own universe it went looking for other universes to explore. It began to explore the multiverse. It found an entry point into a space where _entropy _reined. The Mind of the Destroyer pushed itself into it. The universe of Man was born.

14 Billion Years ago

There was nothing.

There was no time or space or matter or energy.

Then something happened.

In ten to the minus thirty seven seconds, the spark of all things exploded into a universe. The fires of creation could not be held in one dimension so it split into two, then three, then twenty seven dimensions creating space. Its fires became trapped in dimensional curls at the subatomic level creating matter. The arrow of entropy was set. Time was created.

The Destroyer had arrived. This is what Saint Lucilla had seen. But her vision was incomplete.

Surayya floated in a sea of memories.

The spice she had taken before this invocation of the Destroyer overwhelmed her. Surayya floated in a sea of memories as she pondered the words spoken to her by Liam.

"_**Acclimation, the process of an individual organism adjusting to change in its environment, allowing it to survive changes in temperature, water and food availability, other stresses and often relates to seasonal weather changes "**_

Acclimation was not adaption. Acclimation was simply a short term adjustment.

"We need time." Surayya thought. "We need time to adjust to who we are." Surayya thought of the upcoming conflict with Buffy.

The law _alone_ cannot provide what life requires." The voice of Muad'dib spoke to her. "All living things _grow_. All growing things _change_." Surayya agreed. The needs of the new and the limits of the old would always be in conflict. There would always be a tension between order and chaos.

Surayya searched for a way to keep that conflict from destroying humanity.

"What we need is a _place_ to work out our issues without destroying the world." Surayya remembered what Sineya had told her about being an ultra nexus. Sineya told her she had the power to build a universe and to pull other elements into it.

Surayya had an idea.

Above the slayers, at the intersect where the sacred fire entered the uncreated space, energies from that space began to pour back down to the scythe. The slayers gasped as something grabbed them. In a field of anti-entropic energies, the evolution of Surayya Atreides accelerated. Secret powers that she had hidden blossomed into full flower.

Her skin felt like armor, her muscles like steel cables. She felt thick and light at the same time. She felt hungry and strong. She felt like she could eat this planet with one gulp and then consume the stars themselves.

She felt like a goddess.

Surayya looked out at Motorria and Lisa and Liam and all of her other friends. They looked so small and unimportant and far away.

"Compared to eternity, their lives are small and meaningless." Surayya thought. In no way did she consider her hubris to be wrong.

The anti entropic space removed all limits. Surayya could feel her body change, as the magics that defined her were amplified and refined. The spark of the Destroyer she had in her became a roaring flame. She opened her eyes and looked up at Buffy who had a sad angry look on her face. She watched Buffy unsheathe her scythe and slowly began to approaching her.

"Time." Surayya thought. "We just need more _time_."

Buffy looked strange. Sand and brown dirt was in her hair. Her face was slack as she went to sleep and something else awoke. Behind her eyes, Buffy Summers was no longer there.

The _Enforcer_ had awakened.

Nearby Liam closed his eyes and prayed that things would turn out different this time.


	19. Chapter 19

All characters from the Dune Universe are property of the Frank Herbert Estate. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

"Humans have a mind, body connect which forms our first and second selves. What if we had a third self that could override, correct and connect the first and second selves? This is what the slayers did. They _provoked_ the third self. They became mind body and _spirit_. This is how they saved the world, again."

"The History and Myth of the Slayers."

Volume I, from the personal library of the third Atreides Emperor.

"The only difference between good and evil is obedience."

-anonymous

Buffy slammed the blade of her scythe into Surayya's arm. Gold sparks flew into the air as Surayya blocked the attack. Surayya twisted and slammed the bottom of her foot into Buffy's face. Buffy flew across the sand like a rag doll. In mid-air, Buffy twisted and fired a burst of energy that could have burned through a foot of steel. Chunks of Surayya's flesh exploded outward and grew back before the pieces hit the ground.

"I beat her once, I can do it again." Surayya thought. She felt the gentle tickling of mystical power across her belly. Her energies flushed upwards, across her breasts and across her back. Her spine glowed emerald green. The part of her mind that was Bene Gesserit recoiled in horror. It had lost all control of the body it once commanded.

Hundreds of meters away, Buffy landed on her feet. She charged back at Surayya. Her blonde hair fluttered in the wind. Her teeth were bared in rage. She flicked across the desert in a fraction of a second and slammed into Surayya at well over two hundred kilometers per hour.

Their bodied tumbled over, Surayya regained her balance. She grabbed Buffy by the throat crushing her windpipe. The _Enforcer_ would not be stopped. It released the tight hold it held over the impossible energies it commanded and let them flow together without limit.

Buffy exploded.

The other slayers were knocked off their feet as the pressure wave hit them. The sacred fire was unmoved.

Surayya roared like a wounded beast as she was blinded. Out of nowhere, Buffy dropped out of the sky and landed on the head of Surayya. Her delicate feet balanced the force of impact. Buffy leapt into a forward flip and drove the razor sharp edge of her scythe into Surayya's back opening her flesh. Buffy landed on her feet behind her.

The mind of Surayya struggled to regain control of her body. It quickly partitioned itself away to protect itself from the forces that were rampaging through Surayya. As far as it could see, none of the others slayers were effected as badly as her. She was always the best and brightest of her class. The mind of Surayya panicked and like a drowning man, it reached out to any source of help. Her expanded mind reached out to the scythe at the base of the sacred flame and through it to the minds of the billions of slayers still connected to it.

They responded.

The minds of _billions_ of slayers merged with Surayya. Her Bene Gesserit training used this new force to control the mystical forces transforming her body.

Buffy paused her attack. She could see that something was happening to Surayya. The glow of mystical forces controlling her dimmed. Buffy could see Surayya slowly returning to normal. She lowered her scythe just a little. She still kept her guard up.

Surayya lay in the sand. Her mind was clear. Her body was healed.

"We have a way to control our evolution." She thought. The echo of the dead weight of billions of slayer minds was still with her. The combined will of billions of slayers dampened any outgrowth of mystical forces.

"We don't have to become like the Old Ones!" She thought. Relief and joy shot through her. "

She was about to stand when the ground shook. A sound like a million locomotives made the world vibrate. Surayya looked over at Motorria who gestured towards the cryogenic freezer that held the remains of the Destroyer.

It was gone.

The sound was everywhere. It vibrated through both the land and the sky. Above, the slayer fleet scattered into higher orbit. Their mystical strings of energy from the slayer fleet dimmed then disappeared one by one. Surayya blinked.

Whiteness overtook the world.

14 Billion years ago The Destroyer had arrived. This is what Saint Lucilla had seen. But her vision was incomplete. The universe that the mind of the Destroyer occupied was co-continuous with every point in the universe of Man. As it moved in its universe, it could move into any point in time in this universe. As it moved over the universe of man, it simply returned the energies it had borrowed back to the original women that had donated it for its creation.

That was how slayers were chosen. They were simply the women than had volunteered to share their power to create the Destroyer in the first place.

And this is what Saint Lucilla had not seen: The Destroyer was born _after_ it had died. Untold power burst upon the Arrakis sands. The remains of the last sandworm were captured and restored. Surayya looked up past the swirling sand and straight into the mouth of a sandworm nearly a kilometer across. Its sharp teeth glowed red and black. Yellow lightening shot over its skin. There was no doubt in her mind.

The Destroyer had returned.

Surayya closed her eyes and smiled as a profound joy swept over her. She had done it. She was whole now. Everything in the world was right again. She could feel the missing parts of herself returning and at last she understood.

"We are the avatars of the Destroyer _because_ we _created_ the Destroyer. We built him from our sprit. We are both the _recipient_ and _source_ of the power. We are not the slaves of heaven. We are gods." She thought.

The Destroyer roared once. The _Enforcer_ withdrew. Buffy Summers returned to her body. Surayya could feel the Destroyer in her mind.

"I knew this moment would happen." He said to Surayya. "We are a unity; we are one self bound by love."

"Why love?" Surayya asked.

"Since love never fails, love is eternal. Love is a form of Eternity." The Destroyer said.

Liam approached them. He and Buffy helped Surayya to her feet.

"We did it." Liam said to her. "We've escaped the crucible. We can live." Liam was smiling as he held Surayya's hand and walked her back to the sietch.


	20. Chapter 20

All characters from the Dune Universe are property of the Frank Herbert Estate. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

Surayya held Buffy's hand. They looked at each other and smiled.

"So what are you two going to do?" Liam asked.

"We're going to do what we've always done." Surayya said.

"We're going to create the future." Buffy finished.


End file.
